


If You Hold On (Life Won't Change)

by jinwann



Category: VIXX
Genre: Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Drama, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 14:47:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14547045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinwann/pseuds/jinwann
Summary: Jaehwan could see their impending collision. And yet, they were glued to their own gravitational orbits. Impact was simply inevitable.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Out of all the things I've written, this is the fic that I've struggled with the most. The prompt was outside my usual writing genres, but finishing it is an accomplishment because there were /so many times/ when I thought I wouldn't. It took a lot of drafts to get here and even if it's not perfect, I'm happy that I stepped out of my comfort zone and did it! Cheers to one big sort of kdrama arranged marriage au with way too many video game references. 
> 
> This is my sekoretnight fic fest submission for prompt H1. To the original prompter, I hope you enjoy it. It may not be what you expected, but I hope it is still enjoyable. 
> 
> Warning: There is a brief mention of emotional manipulation not related to any of the main characters in part 2.

Jaehwan is the youngest of three sons to Lee Technologies, one of the largest conglomerates of technology software and digital security services, and he has never had any misconceptions about what his role in the family was. 

The first son was the heir to the company, trained every day in the ways of the company and brought to the level of shareholders in his role. The second son was second in command to the company president, trained in managing the subsidiary businesses and in handling international deals to bring more fame and fortune to the company. The third son was the failsafe and the showpiece. The third son was trained to take on any role, but never as well as their elders. The third son was the face of the company, a bright and shiny personality to the political and corporate world that could do no wrong and that could hide the slightly less legal, greedy dealings behind a brilliant smile and a cheery demeanor that gave nothing away. The third son faced the populace with an approachable presence to delude them in a capitalist society. 

Jaehwan fit his role well; he had grown up solely for that. He attended large shareholder parties only to smile and shake hands and talk meaningless pleasantries to put them in better favor with his brothers. He stood in open forums, well dressed with a disarming smile behind his brothers as they talked about personal data and glossed over what their company truly withheld from consumers. And behind closed doors, he sat under the strict gaze of his father and studied the company’s proceedings—meeting notes, contracts, expense reports, and projected company stocks until his vision swam and he couldn’t make out the text on the page anymore. 

Jaehwan had no delusions about his role in the company. He’d been shown every day, for all of his twenty-five years, exactly what his role was.

But late at night when his eyes begin to blur over the words _decreased profits_ , _political turmoil_ , _internal data leaks_ , and he reaches out with a desperate plea to his father and his brothers that the economy is going to crash, no one listens. It’s not his business, they say. _Find a better suit, prepare for a shareholders meeting, and leave the business to your older brothers_ , his father doesn’t say aloud but conveys with stern eyes and clenched fists. 

And Jaehwan does as he’s told. He texts Seokjin and spends the night holding on to his secretary with shaking hands and a heart too big for his chest as everything he knows is going to fall apart and there isn’t anything he can do to stop it. 

“The market is going to collapse and I _know_ it’s going to happen. I spent three nights not sleeping reading those reports and they’re just ignoring me! All of the companies in the technology sector are going to suffer when the economy caves and I don’t know if we can come back from this.” 

Seokjin listens to him, pulls him close when it feels like he’s going to fall apart. He’s still there in the morning with a plate of breakfast when it all comes suddenly, horribly rushing back and Jaehwan has to steel his stomach so that his fears don’t come up. He’s still there when Jaehwan has to iron his best black suit, when he struggles with his tie, when he fumbles with the keys to his apartment to lock it behind him because his hands are shaking so much. 

Seokjin gently takes his hands, squeezes them so they stop trembling. “Be strong,” he says, his tone firm and reassuring. “Talk with your brothers. Do what you can, and don’t beat yourself up if nothing changes. It’s not your fault if they don’t listen.”

He smiles kindly, promising to be there for the shareholders meeting in the afternoon when Jaehwan is sure to need him again. He bounds down the stairs, headed to the parking garage to pull the car up front. As they head off to work, Jaehwan feels only marginally better having someone so calm and collected by his side. 

But he isn’t granted a moment with his brothers. The day passes in a distant blur, his brothers are locked in handshakes at the shareholders meeting and they wave him off after it as they’re roped into drinks with their colleagues. He texts them relentlessly, tries to contact their secretaries, and still they don’t hear him.

Then, it’s too late. 

The next morning Jaehwan wakes up to the news that the stock market crashed, the economy had taken a hit, and Lee Technologies was at the center of it all. A data breach had been exposed to the public. His phone was dead silent but the television seemed to blare loud like a fog horn. Thousands of dollars lost, public face destroyed, and only a capitalist, money-grubbing scumbag could have caused such a disaster. 

Truthfully, he doesn’t know if they can recover from this. Lee Technologies was the company his grandfather built from the ground up. It’s not his job to recover the company- no, that was his brothers’ jobs. His job is to plaster a smile to his face and stand tall against the shareholders, the politicians, and the public and bear the brunt of the turmoil that would surely ensue. 

Being the youngest of three sons, Jaehwan wasn’t sure just how much longer he’d be useful if the company was trampled in the dirt and there was no one to face but the stern, steely eyes of his father. 

 

 

Quick shuttering of cameras, synthetic lights spilling from behind the closed door, the mutter of reporters and shareholders and politicians muffled from the public conference room. Jaehwan is anxious almost, because this isn’t how this usually goes. When he is to make a speech before the company, he is often by the side of his eldest brother. When he used to address the international committee, he stood by his second brother. When he stood beside his father, he was to shake hands and say pleasantries and remember who he was talking to, what companies they owned, and how important they were to the company. When he’s to be the face of the company, he is by himself in a studio. 

And now that all of it had disappeared in the blink of an eye, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do beside his brothers and his father. Behind this door awaited a world he didn’t know anymore, one that would surely scorn him and his family for the wrongdoings they’d done. And he would have to look remorseful when this could have been avoided. 

He wasn’t here to do damage control. He didn’t know why he was here at all. 

He swallows thickly around the lump in his throat, fidgets with his tie that feels too tight no matter how hard he tugs on it. His eldest brother suddenly glances at him fondly, stepping to face him and placing steady hands over his to fix his tie. 

“You’ll be fine,” Jaeho murmurs under his breath, his tone almost alarmingly calm. “It’s your turn to step up to the plate.”

He has no clue what his brother means, and all the air leaves his lungs when he opens his mouth to ask. He forms the first syllable when the security guard opens the door and he’s blinded by camera flashes and yelling from the reporters and the sudden onslaught of pressure to fall in line behind his father and be the face. 

Jaehwan and his father sit at the conference table at the front of the room. His brothers stay behind, because it wasn’t their duty to stand in front of the public. They had families, and his father didn’t want to subject their families to this kind of life as much as possible—and that left Jaehwan to bear the full force of the maelstrom. The security guards stand on either side of the table, keeping a careful eye on those gathered. 

He doesn’t spare a glance at his father, he’s not supposed to. But if he had, he would have seen the slight smile taking over his father’s ever stern face. 

With a wave of his father’s hand, the senseless chatter comes to dull whispers. The microphones turn on with a subtle screech from the feedback. Jaehwan intertwines his fingers and grips tight underneath the table. 

The reporters’ hands go up in a flurry. They all try to speak at once, direct his father’s attention to them. The camera shutters go off again in a cacophonous sound as the lights flash. His father motions to a reporter in the back, in a suit with one of the highest profile news organizations who stands almost intimidatingly. 

“With the recent data breach, Lee Technologies has come under fire for the leak of thousands’ personal data. What will you do in reparation for this disaster?” 

There’s a pause. His father clears his throat and then silently bows his head. “I cannot convey just how remorseful my family and I are for what has happened. It was our duty to keep the personal information of our customers safe, and we were unable to do so. This data breach has been just one of the many things that have befallen our company, and we will deal with each aspect as fast as we can so that our customers can feel reassured that their data is safe with us.”

Another reporter pops up this time, louder, his voice grating. “How do you plan to deal with the stock market crash and the thousands of dollars lost to stockholders and shareholders in the company?”

And again, his father bows his head. “We are taking counter measures as we speak to ensure that the company can rise again. Though the stock market crash has cost us immensely, we must take care of those employed with us and those doing business with us to ensure that the impacts on them are small. Though we will be cutting back on hires, we will do all that we can to bring the company back to the forefront of technology with the launch of new, more secure data services.”

The questions continue with the effect of insinuating why they didn’t do enough, why didn’t they predict this, it’s been a week since the crash and the company has yet to recover any of its standing in the stock market. There was more they should have done to protect their customers, and they should feel shameful of their actions. 

Jaehwan does, even if this was out of his control. His nails are digging hard into his palm, threatening to break skin. His father gently brushes his hand over his, a silent reassurance. It’s almost over. 

A woman reporter stands up, microphone and nametag from an online news source that Jaehwan doesn’t recognize. “There have been rumors of a merger with Allied Tech, can you confirm or deny the merger?”

The room spins into a buzz until his father quiets it down. “I am happy to announce that in light of the recent crash, Lee Technologies will be merging with Allied Tech—symbolized with the arranged marriage of my youngest son, Lee Jaehwan, to Allied Tech’s rising corporate head, Lee Hongbin.”

Jaehwan almost breaks all composure right then. His nails almost break skin. His heart feels like it’s inflated in his chest and it’s straining against his ribs, pushing heavy into his sternum as if to break it. He stops breathing altogether when a nudge from his father forces a gritted smile on his face. 

He had not been told any of this, hadn’t been part of any of the merger meetings. He hadn’t even known what had been going on behind the scenes while he’d spent sleepless nights and tireless days doing damage control. 

The reporters and shareholders are all looking at him, bright eyed like this was their next meal after starving in the desert. He wishes he could turn invisible. Maybe his chest will explode and the hyenas will have another meal to feast over. 

He’s gasping for air around words stuck in his throat. He bows his head, screaming at himself _what the fuck is going on?_. He looks up at carnivorous eyes and fixes his smile. 

“I-It is a great honor,” he lies through his teeth, feeling his stomach turn itself upside down. 

The press conference ends like that. Jaehwan blinks through the last of the questions, feeling winded and sick. The mood in the room is as if the announcement of his—fuck, _arranged marriage—_ had had turned it around. He could still hear the murmurs, see the dark look on the faces of the reporters and shareholders, but so many of the people in the room were smiling and their cameras clicked faster and questions were still yelled across the room as Jaehwan and his father were shuffled out of the room. 

The announcement was like a band-aid slapped on to a gaping wound. And when Jaehwan glances over his shoulder, his father is smiling too. 

They’re directed down the hall to the CEO’s main office to wait out the reporters swarmed around the building and in the conference room. Jaehwan trips over his own feet, catching himself just before he runs into Jaeho. He’s holding himself together—he can do at least that much—but his breaths are still coming out shallow and his hands are feeling numb. As soon as they’re in the conference room, the security guards waiting outside, his fists are shaking with the effort to contain himself. 

“Dad! You—“ 

His father waves a hand to shush him. It feels like a gut punch. 

“Jaehwan, please take a seat first,” he says, using his no nonsense, no arguing tone. Jaehwan obediently takes a seat, biting down into his lip to contain himself. His brothers take a seat on either side of his father, who takes the head of the table. 

“I know you must have a lot of questions, but let me explain,” he begins, folding his hands in front of him. He rubs his eyes, lifting up his glasses for a moment, before heaving a sigh and looking at Jaehwan wearily. “This company took a huge hit. And your brothers and I looked over the reports. There was no recovering from this on our own.”

“Let me just—” Jaehwan interrupts. “I told you it was going to happen! I warned you and no one listened. And now your solution is an arranged marriage?!”

His father holds up a hand, and like a well-trained puppy, Jaehwan clamps his mouth shut. 

“We are in debt to them, Jaehwan. The CEO of Allied Tech reached out to me with a deal that we could not afford to pass up on—that would save this company from total bankruptcy! CEO Lee is a man I have come to know well in recent years; he is a very kind, smart man that has promised to bring both of our businesses to greatness under our combined ownership. This is the only way to save the company that we—no, I—have put years of blood and sweat into and I could not simply let this chance to save it slip between my fingers!”

“But—“ 

His father’s gaze hardens, and Jaehwan feels his blood go ice cold. “Not another word. I did this for this company, for the people in it, and for the three of you. I will not let you three fall to ruin by my mistakes.”

Feeling like a fish gaping for water after being washed ashore, Jaehwan sinks back limply into his chair. He winces, feeling his lip split beneath his teeth and the tang of blood on his tongue. The anger, the resentment that had been building up inside of him, was wheezing out of him like a punctured balloon. He didn’t have the words for what he was feeling now. 

“And the arranged marriage?” he asks, his voice hardly louder than a whisper. 

His father glances down at his hands for a moment. “It was, in fact, my idea. Both of us agreed that there needed to be a way to bring up the public image of Lee Technologies before it went into the merger to ensure the best possible acquisition of the company. And Allied’s CEO was certainly in approval of the idea to wed his son as well.”

Jaehwan sinks back further into his chair. Where his heart had felt like it was filling up his chest, pressing against his lungs and battering against his sternum, now felt like it had rescinded to nothing but a speck. He felt incredibly hollow and drained. 

“It is only for show,” his father says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a small smile. “All we have asked is that you and CEO Lee’s son move in together, in case the press tries to pressure you separately, and that you put on a show for the wedding. You are otherwise free to live your separate lives as the young powers of technology for our company.”

“And if we want other relationships? What will the press do if they find out?”

His father’s gaze bores into him, like a laser pinning down its target. “For now, you will do as I say. We will cross that bridge when we get there.”

 _Do your duty. You were born for this,_ he hears in his head, ringing like a toll bell. The last of his fight had left him, and he couldn’t figure a way out. What role could he serve but to remedy this and go along with it. 

“Yes, father,” he whispers, feeling like his ten-year old self once more. “I understand.”

He sits silently as his father and brothers continue talking, only able to process the ringing in his ears. After an eternity of sitting there, stewing over the thoughts swirling in his head and feeling like he could crawl out of his skin, the security guards open the door and let them know that the coast is relatively clear now. They head down the elevators towards the back, discreet entrance of the building where a car is waiting for them. All of them pile in, and each one is dropped off at their apartments. Jaeho leaves first, his wife already waiting at the door of their modest house. His middle brother Jaegwan leaves next to a much more glamorous house, his daughter waddling out to meet him by the iron gates. And just before Jaehwan nearly bolts from the car, his father passes him an envelope of papers nearly as thick as his fists. 

“It’s the details of the merger in the contract signing that you missed. Be sure to read it over tonight.”

Jaehwan doesn’t say anything as he takes the contract and bolts, slamming the car door behind him. The elevator ride blurs with his thoughts, a maelstrom of _why him?_ and _I don’t have a choice_. He gets off five floors below his and decides to take the stairs the rest of the way. He punches in the code to his apartment wrong three times and then drops his keys when he tries to open the door. How long had his hands been shaking?

His apartment is a welcomed solace. No lights, no sounds, no people, no camera lights, no cold gazes of betrayals, no plastered smiles. He doesn’t turn on any of the lights as he heads for his room, shedding off his suit jacket and his tie somewhere along the way. He dumps the contract on his desk, shucks off his belt, and flops directly on his bed just to stare into space. 

His gaze drops to the ache in his hands, his thumb gently rubbing over the angry crescent moons stamped into his palms. He huffs, the air dense in his lungs, and he stares. What was his life going to become? What did he even think of all this? Would he have said anything differently if he had been there to decide this- if he’d had a chance to speak up for himself?

Would the sight of someone else stuck in the same predicament have changed anything? Did—fuck, even thinking it made his stomach hurt but—his future husband accept this without a fight? Did the CEO’s son even care?

He doesn’t have the strength to pull out his phone and look up whatever the fuck _his_ name was. He lays there until there’s a knock on the door some time later- which he doesn’t go to answer. The door opens anyway, and Seokjin is standing at his door with a bag of food and a solemn sort of look on his face. 

“I saw the news,” he says, smiling not out of pity but out of sympathy. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Jaehwan shakes his head. 

“Then let’s eat—and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

It takes a lot of effort, but Jaehwan drags himself up from bed. Seokjin leaves to go set up the takeout boxes of way too much food, silently signaling for him to change into pajamas and pick out a movie on Netflix. Jaehwan spends an absurd amount of time trying to pick one—and in the end, Seokjin has to take the remote anyway and settle for the latest Batman movie that had been added. He doesn’t even care that it was the shitty one, he eats from his food like a zombie and lets the time drift by until Seokjin asks to borrow some pajamas pass out on his couch for the night. 

Once Seokjin is asleep, Jaehwan shuffles back into his room and sits at his desk. He dutifully reads over the contract until a third of the way in, his eyes blur over the words that the wedding is in two months, and he drifts off to sleep with his cheek pressed to the pages. 

 

 

The first time they meet, it is a surreal experience. 

He’s standing on a small podium, arms out as a tailor wraps a tape measure around his chest, when there’s a sudden commotion and about thirty people enter the room at once. Most of them are reporters, cameras clicking away, and at the center of it all is, who he presumes to be, CEO Lee and his younger son, somewhere around Jaehwan’s age, by his side. 

He’s handsome, is the first thought that passes through Jaehwan’s mind. He also looks like the stereotypical rich chaebol elite son. Also, with a horrific jolt of his heart, Jaehwan has entirely forgotten his name. 

The older man directs all the reporters to stand behind some sofas in the changing room. Seokjin looks up politely from where he had been seated on one of the couches, even as the reporters knock into him with their cameras. The CEO approaches Jaehwan first, kind eyes upturned in a pleasant smile as he holds his hand out. 

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Lee,” he says, his voice gruff with age but warm still. 

Jaehwan has to awkwardly bend over while the tailor huffs behind him. “It’s n-nice to meet you, too. Please, call me Jaehwan.”

CEO Lee looks even brighter as he shuffles his son forward. His son is well dressed in his own business suit, his hair perfectly pulled back from his forehead. His gaze is certainly less kind than his father’s, but he doesn’t seem to have any mean intent towards him. Rather, he seems to be much more curious about him. 

“This is my son, Hongbin. I hope that you two become close friends at the very least.”

Jaehwan bows a little, his heart welling up in his chest. He says a small prayer in thanks that CEO Lee had said his son’s name before he had to play a game of weaseling it out. “It’s an honor.”

Unexpectedly, Hongbin flushes and stutters, “N-No, it’s cool! I- uh- y-you don’t have to be so formal around me.”

Jaehwan smiles, genuinely, and straightens up when the tailor snaps at him. Hongbin is red to the tips of his ears, and somehow Jaehwan didn’t expect him to be so nervous? In all those photos he’d seen online, Hongbin looked the role of the company heir, though without even a scandal under his name. 

Hongbin comes to stand beside him, watching intently as the tailor finishes measuring him. He never would have imagined that the first time meeting would have been at a tailor suiting for their _arranged marriage_ in front of a bunch of reporters, but he’s feeling a little burnt out with all the work that’s piled up and the mess of his apartment. The whole situation is just _weird_ and frankly, he’s sure the anxious thump of his chest will stop at some point. 

An awkward silence ensues as the tailor flits around Jaehwan, mumbling to himself, and the void fills with the incessant shutters of the cameras. There’s nothing he hates more than an awkward silence, so he decides to ask, “Are you finished at the office for the day?”

Hongbin startles, like he hadn’t expected Jaehwan even talk to him. “Uh, no, I h-have to go back after this for a meeting,” he replies, fiddling with his hands before deciding that it’s probably not a good idea to do in public and shoves his hands in his pockets. 

He doesn’t say anything else. Jaehwan racks his brain, panicking for anything to say. 

“What’s the meeting about?”

“Uh, nothing, honestly,” Hongbin says, looking down to his shoes before, gaze flitting away. Again, he doesn’t say anything after that. 

The tailor tells him to put his suit back on and write down the suit’s size. He switches to Hongbin, telling him to take his coat off and hold his arms out. The reporters click away, seemingly unable to tell that Jaehwan can hardly get a conversation across. 

“What time do you normally finish work?”

“Just… whenever. It sort of varies.”

Great. So specific. 

He stands off to the side and watches the tailor work, deciding that maybe awkward silence is better than stilted conversation. Hongbin is incredibly flushed, red peaking from the collar of his shirt. His smile is incredibly awkward every time the cameras catch his attention. He looks wholly uncomfortable being in the public eye, where Jaehwan has basically lived his whole life. He fidgets on the podium, and the tailor keeps having to make comments telling him to stand still. In return, he regards the tailor with a polite smile and even holds his breath a little to keep himself still. 

Though they’re standing side by side, Jaehwan feels a chasm of space between them.

Every time he looks over to Hongbin’s father, CEO Lee regards him with a huge smile and a big thumbs up—a completely opposite demeanor from Hongbin. Other than by looks, Jaehwan wouldn’t even be able to guess that they are related. He’d making polite conversation with Seokjin since he’d arrived, which is impressive on Jaehwan’s end at the very least. 

On some level, he’d expected his father-in-law to be like his own, and it was a welcomed reprieve on the anxiety in his chest that this man seemed far from it. Well, at least in the public eye. 

When the tailor wraps up some time later, Jaehwan tucks himself close to Hongbin, hand on his sleeve to get his attention before he bolts for the door. Hongbin looks up startled, like a deer in the headlights. It’s a little comical, and maybe he would’ve laughed if all the cameras hadn’t gone off in a furious amount of clicks. 

He swallows around his heart beating in his throat. “Do you want to grab coffee sometime?” 

Hongbin looks around, clearly frantic to get out, and the sting of that closes tight around Jaehwan’s lungs. “I’m sorry, I don’t really drink coffee,” he rushes, pulling himself away and bolting for where his father stands by the door. His father gives him a pleasant wave, and just like that, they’re gone and so are the reporters. 

Seokjin gives him a sympathetic look when they’re alone. “Looks like it went well,” he says, sarcastic in tone but much more tender in meaning. 

Jaehwan shrugs. “I don’t really know what I was expecting,” he replies. It’s only partially true. 

Seokjin leads him into the car out back and doesn’t say much else as he takes Jaehwan home for the day. It gives him a lot of time to think about Hongbin, which he doesn’t really want to do but the other option is to feel bad and he’s never been good at dealing with that. Seokjin talks to fill up the space, telling him of his schedule for tomorrow and Jaehwan doesn’t really pay attention much after that. It’s comforting at least, that at least someone on the planet wants to talk to him. 

When he makes it back to his complex, Seokjin waves him off with a reminder of his 8 AM meeting tomorrow. He nods absentmindedly and drags his feet up the stairs, feeling way more exhausted than for what little had happened today. He unlocks the front door, and for all that he expected that a weight would be lifted from his chest, another heavier weight settles in its place. There are piles of moving boxes everywhere. Much of his living room had seemingly been packed already, when he drops in and finds everything from his technical business books to his personal manga packed away. His Nintendo Switch was missing from the television stand, some of the smaller seating chairs were just gone entirely. Some of his kitchen had been packed away too, most of the smaller appliances already in a box labeled with a huge scribble. His bedroom had mostly been left untouched, but he certainly doesn’t miss the stack of papers on his desk and a yellow post-it note right atop it. 

He tosses his suit jacket to the floor, not caring if it wrinkles. He flops on his bed and closes his eyes, trying his hardest to breathe through the feeling of his chest compressing, tightening, almost hurting. He’ll read the papers on his desk later, maybe after he emotionally eats through some of the cake in his fridge. 

 

 

The only time he really sees Hongbin is in between wedding preparations. He’d gotten Hongbin’s phone number through his father, but sent a cordial message hello and Hongbin had never responded after that, so he’d decided not to bother. At work, he’s congratulated with messages and flowers for his long time, non-existent relationship he’s had with Hongbin—the lie that’s flooded all the papers and magazines. 

Everything feels relatively misplaced and strange. 

Their fathers had decided that the wedding itself was going to be just a public signing of court papers, and immediately after it would be an extravagant reception borrowing out floors of one of Seoul’s premier hotels to stir up business and buzz about the company. For all it’s worth, the buzz is certainly helping company stocks, and maybe if Jaehwan focuses on it really hard, he can find it in his heart to believe that this is something good. 

It doesn’t ever really work, but he pretends that it does. 

Three weeks before the wedding and two weeks after the tux fitting, Seokjin drives him up to the hotel entrance. Jaehwan has practically lived his life here, seeing as almost every formal party his father had held was in this hotel, so he heads off towards the main ballroom by himself. It’s cleared out, bizarrely empty, and it feels strange seeing no one else in there but his mother, Hongbin, and Hongbin’s mother. They’re seated around the only table in the ballroom, set up with books stacked upon each other. 

He comes to sit by his mother, extremely thankful for her presence there. She shares a subtle look that he understands, and pats his hand comfortingly. “Now that we’re all here, how about we get started on deciding the color scheme for the wedding!” she says, clapping her hands together and looking around excitedly. 

“Of course!” Hongbin’s mother cheers, opening up one of the books in front of her. It’s her personal planner, but it contains an _extensive_ list of things that need to be done. She slides on her reading glasses and slides her finger down the page of things that need color coordinating. “Now, you both will be wearing black tuxes at the reception, so we can’t have any of the tables or flowers clashing with your handsome faces! What color would you both like the tablecloths to be?”

Jaehwan, in his own small fantasies, had never wanted a very standard wedding. And since he’s getting a choice, he says, “Pale pink.”

“White,” Hongbin says immediately after him. Both of them share a puzzled look before looking to their moms for help—who are both laughing and reaching up to squeeze each of their respective cheeks. 

“Aren’t you kids just adorable,” his mom says. “Let’s go with white tablecloths and pink accenting on the plates!”

“Oh, that’s a fantastic idea!” Mrs. Lee cheers, laughing a little bit alongside his mom. Hongbin looks embarrassed… maybe? He can’t really tell. Jaehwan, despite his talent in masking his true feelings, finds himself flushing under Hongbin’s intense gaze. 

“Okay, now what about the centerpiece for the tables?” Mrs. Lee asks, writing something down in her planner. 

“Flowers.”

“Candles.”

Jaehwan clamps a hand over his mouth, finding Hongbin doing the same. Again, both their mothers are laughing. This time, Hongbin’s ears turn red and Jaehwan feels his cheeks heat up. 

“Let’s do both,” Mrs. Lee suggests. “Oh! Let’s have a bouquet of baby pink hydrangeas on each table, alongside small, white candles.”

His mom interjects. “I just saw this adorable arrangement on Pinterest where the candle holders had flowers in the bottom—I’ll e-mail you the link. They are just gorgeous and they’d look wonderful on the table!”

Their moms talk on for a while, and Jaehwan and Hongbin mostly just sit in silence. They decide the layout of the reception hall, the number of tables and guests, who they’re going to select to play the music, hors d’oeuvre, wine and champagne choices, and the rest of the small details. Jaehwan feels his head spinning when they suddenly ask him what colors he wants the invitations embossed with, and he barely manages to stutter out an answer. Whatever color he said, Hongbin smiles at him and agrees with the decision.

“Now that we’ve decided most of the ballroom’s decorations and details, let’s talk about the wedding cake that will be served to the guests,” his mother says. “You two just pick the flavors, and we will work on the cake’s design for you! It’s getting quite late already, you two should head home soon and get some sleep.”

Jaehwan’s extremely thankful that his mother is here. He’s sure this would have taken him and Hongbin the entire night to decide anything, seeing as they can’t find anything to agree on. 

One of the hotel staff come out with a tray full of small cake pieces stuck through with toothpicks. Jaehwan hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and the sight of so many cakes is almost making him salivate. He hardly manages to hold himself back from picking up the chocolate piece closest to him. 

And of course, a quick glance at Hongbin shows him that he looks extremely averted to the cake entirely. _Who the fuck doesn’t like cake?_

Jaehwan is able to name each of the flavors off one by one without taking a second to blink. They work through vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, lemon, strawberry, almond cream, and hazelnut cake testers amongst an entire combination of icings. He’s smiling after every piece despite himself, and picking is just going to be so difficult!

Another look up. This time Hongbin’s gaze darts away from him frantically, and he stares down at the untouched vanilla mouse cake in front of him. 

After his mom and Mrs. Lee have picked their way through all the cakes, they giggle behind their hands about the flavors they liked, but they both turn to their sons simultaneously. “Which flavor do you like for your wedding cake?”

“Strawberry.”

Their answer is simultaneous. Jaehwan almost slams a hand over his mouth. Hongbin actually does.

“Well, then it’s settled!” Mrs. Lee cheers, marking off the last note in her planner and shutting it with a satisfied little noise. “You boys have done a lot of work today, and we’ll be taking care of the rest! The cars are around back, I’m sure, so go home and get some sleep.”

Thankful to be dismissed, Jaehwan slides out of his chair and bows his head to Mrs. Lee on his way out. Hongbin mimics him, and they both end up walking towards the lobby in the same awkward silence that had overtaken them at the tux fitting. Maybe Jaehwan’s growing used to it somehow, but it’s a little nice that he doesn’t have to exert himself. 

It’s nearing 8PM when they finally step outside, and the chilly night air makes him shiver. There’s two black cars waiting for them, and he wonders for a moment when there will be just one car waiting for them when they begin going home together. Or maybe they’ll still have two cars. Seokjin waves him over to the second car, and he already has the door open when he hears someone clear their voice behind him.

“Uhm,” Hongbin says, “I hope to see you around sometime soon.”

He looks up at Jaehwan with big, hopeful eyes that sparkle from an indiscernible light. He’s still red in the face, but from so close up, Jaehwan can finally see the heavy bags under his eyes and the dull pallor of his skin. Somehow he still looks beautiful—maybe that’s just the moonlight—but Jaehwan knows that bone deep exhaustion well. 

So Jaehwan gives him a sweet smile and rests a gentle hand on his upper arm. “We will,” he says. “If you ever need an ear, you’ve got my number, okay?”

Hongbin nods, looking down at his feet. He balances on them, seeming like he wants to say more, but he instead waves and darts into his car. 

Another strange exchange. But he hadn’t accounted for the fact that maybe Hongbin was just busier in different ways. Poor thing probably wasn’t sleeping much at all.

He’s lucky there’s still leftovers in his fridge by the time he makes it home, otherwise he would’ve simply called it a night after eating all that cake. He’s three bites into his dinner, sitting up on his counter amidst more moving boxes, when his phone buzzes beside him. To his surprise, it actually is Hongbin. 

_I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your message until now. I’m really, really sorry. It must have just slipped my radar. But, thank you for your offer today. I’ll text you again another time?_

Jaehwan stares at his phone a bit, stuffs food into his mouth, and then stares a little longer. He closes out his text app, flicks through a few pages of Google Images, then comes back with a gif of corgi puppies bouncing around. 

_it’s fine, dw abt it. text me whenever u need to talk_

He shrugs at his response, puts his phone face down on the counter, and continues eating dinner. He considers maybe hopping onto his 3DS just for a bit until the sight of his bed really sinks in and he flops into it with absolutely no grace. 

His phone buzzes beside him once more. 

_Thanks! I love cats but corgis are cute too. ___

__It’s hard not to realize how drastically different they are, but he wonders to himself how much more there is of Hongbin he doesn’t know._ _

__

__

__As the wedding gets closer, any time that Jaehwan doesn’t spend at work he spends it in wedding preparations. His work hours become longer as the time for the official merger approaches and the wedding preparations become even more stressful when he gets panicked calls from his mother that something or other has gone wrong._ _

__(Frankly, who cares if something isn’t absolutely perfect for the wedding. It feels a little like everyone has forgotten entirely that he has met Hongbin an entirety of two times.)_ _

__He’s used to the pressure, the stress and the constant influx of things that absolutely need his attention. He’s used to multitasking, talking to a variety of people, and handling other people’s emotions when they project onto him. He’s used to spending his precious time at home—what time he has left in his quickly emptying apartment—taking care of himself and making sure that he’s giving time to his own emotions. His trashcan is stuffed to the brim with sheet masks and he’s logged in another 20 hours into his Animal Crossing game in the last week, but that’s just the way he’s always taken care of himself._ _

__Unsurprisingly, Hongbin is extremely awful at taking care of himself._ _

__He realizes it two weeks before the wedding when Hongbin steps into the hotel ballroom after work and seems to freeze at the door. The ballroom is filled with people running around like chickens without heads. It’s half decorated: chiffon banners of white have been strung along the walls, the tables are set up and about half of them are covered in a white table cloth and name plates, centerpiece candle holders have been stacked up in a corner, and most noticeably of all, a huge table had been set up at the front of the room where they’d be standing under the prying eyes of just about everyone in the elite world._ _

__Jaehwan watched the panic flit across Hongbin’s face just before he bolts. And Jaehwan doesn’t know what overcomes him when he springs up from his chair and runs after him._ _

__Turns out Hongbin is way more fit than he lets on because Jaehwan feels like his lungs are going to collapse when he finally manages to corner Hongbin on the 6th floor of the hotel, outside the emergency staircase. He’s practically heaving for air—he must look pretty stupid because Hongbin isn’t even breathing heavy after running up six flights of stairs. He’s still trying to swallow around the lump in his throat when their gazes meet._ _

__His heart clenches suddenly. He knows the look of being at the last barrier of defense for holding back emotions._ _

__The sixth floor patio is a relatively hidden space in the hotel; Jaehwan’s escaped to it a number of times. Once he’d realized that the exit alarm was broken on the door, he’d spent a number of party nights on a little wooden bench that overlooked a decent street view._ _

__He drags himself to that little bench now, catching Hongbin’s hand with a little jolt of electricity, and plops them both on the bench. Hongbin looks skittish being there, almost like he’s going to bolt again, but he just continues fidgeting in his chair as Jaehwan slides his suit jacket off and pulls out his tie._ _

__“Fuck, you run fast,” he swears, very much embarrassingly still out of breath. Hongbin doesn’t really respond more than giving him a half-shrug and looking at his hands where he’s picking the skin around his thumb._ _

__Jaehwan lets the silence settle around them, figuring he could at least let Hongbin gather his thoughts. It’s a nice evening for spring, the air isn’t cold as it blows around them and the sun already beginning to set. It casts warm shadows on his hands and glints off the glossy polish of his shoes. He chances a glance at Hongbin, and fuck, he does look really handsome. This absolutely isn’t the time to think about how Hongbin really does have a sharp jawline and high cheekbones that the sun seems to glint off of. His hair is prettily framed around his face, a little disheveled but _really_ pretty. A little flush had taken over Hongbin’s cheeks, maybe from running or maybe he’d realized Jaehwan was staring at him. _ _

__At that thought, he does manage to pull himself away. He tugs out his phone and texts his mom that both of them are just catching a breather outside and they’ll be back shortly. He messes around on his phone to distract himself, which really means he sets up a lure on the hotel’s Pokémon Go stop and watches as the Pokémon start to flock around his avatar._ _

__He’s in the middle of trying to catch a Torchic when he hears Hongbin let out a huge sigh and sink back bonelessly into the chair._ _

__“What do you think about all this?” he asks, still not looking anywhere specifically._ _

__Jaehwan shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to keep myself busy so as not to dwell on it for so long.”_ _

__Hongbin sighs again. “I don’t know either.” His hands are bunching up the fabric of his slacks. “It’s just… a lot of pressure handling the merger? And the wedding? And you and I are just—“_ _

__“—different,” Jaehwan supplies._ _

__“Yeah, that…” Hongbin says, finally meeting his gaze again._ _

__Jaehwan thinks back to before any of this had happened. He was, of course in an entirely different position than Hongbin. He could satisfy himself with the knowledge that this was at least going to rectify the problems his family’s company had caused and this merger was going to save a lot of people from losing their jobs._ _

__“I know that we don’t know each other that well—but I feel like you get it. I don’t know how you’re dealing with all this—hell, probably more than what I have to deal with—but I feel like this is a lot,” Hongbin blurts out all in one go, like if he didn’t say it fast enough than he’d lose the courage to say it entirely. “Or maybe I’m just overthinking all this? I mean, I’m only 24 and getting married to—“_ _

__“—a complete stranger—“_ _

__“—yeah!” Hongbin clamps a hand over his mouth. “Wait, I didn’t mean it like that!”_ _

__Jaehwan stifles a laugh behind his hand. Hongbin looks exasperated after all that, his hands hovering around in the air like he doesn’t know what to do with them. He turns red, flushing to the tips of his ears. He cradles his face in his hands. “This is horrible,” he mumbles. “You probably think I’m really dumb.”_ _

__Jaehwan lays a comforting hand on Hongbin’s shoulder. “I don’t think you’re dumb,” he says. It takes a surprisingly strong effort to pull Hongbin’s hands away from his face. “You saw me earlier; I probably look so gross after running up six flights of stairs after you. What’s embarrassing is that the last time I ran, I was in university and my roommate had stolen my 3DS and erased my Animal Crossing save file on accident. I could’ve chased that asshole to the ends of the earth.”_ _

__That manages to draw a shy laughter out of Hongbin. Jaehwan hasn’t gotten to see a lot of it, but Hongbin’s smile is a little like the sunlight itself, warm and comforting. He finds his heart slowing to a steady thump in the little breath of silence. “You don’t look that bad,” Hongbin says, clearing his throat a little._ _

__“You don’t have to lie. I know my hair probably looks like a bird’s nest.”_ _

__Hongbin shakes his head. “No, really, it’s fine.”_ _

__The aura of panic that had surrounded Hongbin, that had been mounting up until this moment, finally seems to dissipate. He looks visibly more relaxed, and Jaehwan is pretty proud of himself for getting him to smile._ _

__“Now, let’s talk about taking a time out. What are you doing for yourself between work and the wedding?” Jaehwan asks, settling his hands back in his lap._ _

__Hongbin looks owlishly at him. “Sleep? That’s, uh, about it.”_ _

__Jaehwan purses his lips in thought. An idea strikes him after a moment. “You’re a gym hunk, aren’t you?”_ _

__Again, Hongbin flushes. It’s almost a little thrilling to test what he can say to get Hongbin to blush. “I wouldn’t call myself that…”_ _

__He nodes sagely, eyeing Hongbin for a moment, catching the definition of his biceps beneath his tight white collared shirt. Oh, Hongbin definitely works out. “Do you like working out?”_ _

__“Well, yeah,” Hongbin responds._ _

__“What else do you like to do?”_ _

__Hongbin ponders it for a moment. He bites down on his lip. “Promise not to laugh?” he stutters._ _

__“Promise,” Jaehwan stays._ _

__“I really like playing Overwatch.”_ _

__Jaehwan can’t help but laugh, and Hongbin immediately panics and starts waving his hands around._ _

__“You said you weren’t going to laugh!”_ _

__“That’s your deepest, darkest secret?” Jaehwan says between gasping for air. “I just revealed to you that I have been religiously taking care of my Animal Crossing village for years. Playing a hugely popular PC game is hardly anything worth being embarrassed about.”_ _

__Hongbin covers his face again. “I know, but my coworkers think I’m weird.”_ _

__Jaehwan sighs, pulling Hongbin’s hands away from his face again but this time holding onto them. “Alright, then I want you to promise me something.”_ _

__“Not that you held up my promise, but sure,” Hongbin quips._ _

__“True,” Jaehwan sighs, “but this is for your benefit. At least one hour when you get home or two if you get home earlier than 9PM, I want you to either go to the gym or play Overwatch. Do anything absolutely for yourself for at least one hour for a night. Shut off your phone, don’t answer your emails, and take the time for yourself. Deal?”_ _

__Hongbin spaces out for a moment before finally relaxing. “Sounds good enough,” he says._ _

__“Trust me, you’ll have a lot more control of yourself if you give yourself the space,” Jaehwan says, letting go of Hongbin’s hands. He still feels a strange crackle of electricity in his chest. “Also, please go home and take the rest of the evening off. I’ll handle today’s wedding preparations.”_ _

__Hongbin looks a little embarrassed. “I-It’s okay! I can totally stay to help oversee things—“_ _

__Jaehwan silences him with a wave of his hand. “Go home today. Call delivery to your house for dinner, because I’m almost positive you haven’t eaten yet. Play Overwatch for two hours and then go to sleep early.”_ _

__Hongbin flounders, his mouth gaping open as he tries to protest. But Jaehwan gives him a stern, serious look, and Hongbin clamps his mouth shut. “Okay,” he says, getting up and dusting off the back of his slacks. His hands are trembling, but Jaehwan can’t really discern why._ _

__He stands up and follows Hongbin to the exit door. They walk down the stairs together, the echoing of their footsteps eerily loud. He walks with Hongbin to the back door where a single black car awaits them._ _

__“Thank you,” Hongbin says, just before he climbs into the back of the car. Jaehwan can hear the swell of relief in his voice, and that enough makes his heart flutter._ _

__“Text me photo proof that you’re giving yourself time tonight, and I promise I won’t ruin the color scheme of the wedding by throwing in a splash of highlighter yellow napkins.”_ _

__Hongbin laughs, the sound bubbly and deep, before he waves Jaehwan off. The car door closes silently and Hongbin’s car disappears around the corner before Jaehwan can catch his breath._ _

__He oversees the wedding preparations for another two, three, maybe four hours. Really, he loses track of time at some point and he’s exhausted after his mom and Mrs. Lee come to him in a huge panic about how not enough dessert plates had been ordered to match the entrée plates. It’s fucking stressful managing all of it by himself, and again, the thought flits through his mind of why any of it matters so much._ _

__He takes a breather in the bathroom, thankful that it’s empty. His phone buzzes in his pocket, and when he takes it out, and he’s pleasantly surprised to see a message from Hongbin. It’s a picture of his desktop monitors, a shot of some Overwatch character with ‘VICTORY’ spelled out across the screen._ _

__It eases the anxiety in his chest a little and gives him a little bit more energy to go back out and face the wedding preparations. He splashes water on his face, fixes his hair (which was actually a disaster, Hongbin had just lied to his face) and heads back to the ballroom feeling a little bit better himself._ _

__

__

__A week before the wedding, Jaehwan officially moves into Hongbin’s apartment._ _

__It’s incredibly neat, nothing like Jaehwan’s in the slightest. He has a strict, grayscale color scheme. There’s not even a little bit of clutter, and somehow all of Jaehwan’s things had easily meshed into the space. The photos on the wall are impersonal, abstract pieces of art that make the apartment seem more like a furniture showroom setup than an actual living space. It is a little similar to his own place in that living room opens to the kitchen and there’s a few doors off in a small hallway on the side, but that’s where the similarities end._ _

__“It’s nice,” Jaehwan manages to say, dragging in a small duffle bag of things that he’d refused any of the movers to touch. Hongbin gives him a small smile in return and gestures him in with a wave of his hand._ _

__Ever since he’d started packing the last of his clothes the previous night, he’d been panicking about actually living with Hongbin. Everything about the wedding was beginning to sink in, and not even a sheet mask was enough to calm his worries about moving in with his… fiancée? But they hadn’t gotten engaged. Using ‘husband’ just felt weird and ‘coworker’ felt even stranger somehow._ _

__“Do you want to eat something?” Hongbin asks, shuffling his feet awkwardly as he stands at the border of the living room and the kitchen. “You can come look and see what’s around. I’m not a fantastic cook, but I can make the basics.”_ _

__“Actually, I’m starved,” Jaehwan says, dumping his duffle bag by the door and kicking his shoes off to the side, not caring where they land. He’d been at work far too early that morning and had been caught up into meeting after meeting that he hadn’t left until almost 9PM. He’d gone home, packed the last of his things, and Seokjin had dropped him off by 10. He was fucking exhausted too, but his stomach was growling so loud he couldn’t think._ _

__He follows Hongbin into the kitchen and immediately starts looking into every cupboard while Hongbin tucks himself into a corner of the kitchen. His cabinets are disturbingly empty—not even a piece of chocolate in sight! There were a few tea canisters neatly organized beside plain mugs and plain dinnerware sets. Beside that was a whole shelf of protein powder and a handful of black water bottles beneath it. The next cupboard had some canisters of tomato sauce, beans, and a small bag of rice. He had enough flour and sugar to maybe bake four cupcakes. Maybe if he squinted, he could make out a small amount of instant pancake mix, but the expiration date was five years past and Jaehwan certainly didn’t want to take his chances._ _

__Hongbin’s fridge is in an even sadder state of existence. The center of the fridge is dominated by a big carton of eggs. The shelf beneath it is full of vegetables like eggplant, onions, spinach, kale, tomatoes, and even more vegetables like squash that he wouldn’t even dream of touching. There’s another full drawer of fruits, a defrosted package of chicken, and jug of water. The freezer seems to only contain salmon, shrimp, and a few packages of frozen vegetables._ _

__He heaves a sigh and shuts the door. “Not even a single bar of ice cream,” he mutters, shaking his head._ _

__That still leave the question of what to eat. Tomorrow he’d stop by the convenience store on his way home and fill up some of those empty cabinets with some _actual_ food. “Fried rice is probably the easiest thing to make, right?”_ _

__Hongbin nods and starts pulling out some of the cookware beneath the stove. “You can watch TV or something, you don’t have to stick around and watch me cook if you have work to do or something.”_ _

__Jaehwan pulls out a bar stool and plops down. “Please, I’m not about to do any more work tonight. I’m over it,” he says, punctuated by a hefty growl of his stomach._ _

__Hongbin smiles a little and then gets set on cooking. He cooks off some green onions, eggs, peas, carrots, and shrimp. He adds in the rice by the end, a big drizzle of soy sauce, and puts in a little bit of gochujang for spice. Jaehwan doesn’t say anything when he does, he figures maybe he’ll be able to handle a little bit of spice._ _

__(He can’t really, but he can suffer in silence.)_ _

__What he gathers from it all is that Hongbin is methodical to an almost painful degree. He never goes one line out of the recipe, he cooks everything with a timer that he frantically turns off every time it goes off, he cleans every dish immediately after he’s done using it before putting it in the dishwasher too. Jaehwan almost feels a little embarrassed, because he would have certainly left the kitchen a mess if Hongbin had moved into his place instead. Hell, he’d probably drive Hongbin mad within a few days if he hadn’t paid attention._ _

__He makes a personal note to be a little neater. Hongbin places the dish in front of him and his stomach roars again. The first bite is heaven, and he starts to shovel more into his mouth with every passing second. He tries not to drop rice around his plate and is careful about not looking like a total slob._ _

__Hongbin just seems to laugh a little as he moans around every mouthful. He can’t imagine how he looks, or what Hongbin is thinking, and he shuts his mouth and tries to eat a little quieter as an uncomfortable heat seems to crawl up his spine._ _

__When they finish eating, Hongbin points him to the shower that connects through to his bedroom. Jaehwan pulls out his pajamas, leaving his duffel bag by the door, and gratefully steps into the bathroom. It’s like a fucking space ship, or a set straight out of Boys Over Flowers. The tub is inlaid into the floor installed with a rain shower. Black tiles spill out along the room, glinting off the clean chrome of the appliances. Every exhale echoes in the space, and there’s so much that Jaehwan could do cartwheels and he wouldn’t hit anything. The toilet is separated by a glass cubicle, and even that looks like it was lifted from the SS Enterprise. There is one sink and nothing on the counter except a floral bar of soap on a silver plated dish._ _

__“Holy fuck,” he can’t help but breathe out. His bathroom didn’t even have a bathtub. Though it was almost midnight, he was for sure going to use that tub tomorrow._ _

__After figuring out the space ship controls for the shower, he cleans up quickly and gets into the pajamas he’d let sit on the heated towel rack. It’s a fucking amazing experience, marriage was going to be great just for this added bonus into his life._ _

__He heads back to get his duffel bag. Almost all the lights had been turned off save for some of the track lighting in the kitchen. The television is on, and Hongbin is nearly about to doze off on the couch. He startles when Jaehwan walks in, eyes wide as he looks around himself and seems to get his bearings after a moment._ _

__“Your bathroom: a work of fucking art,” he says, triumphantly pulling out his hair dryer. “Honestly, it’s way more amazing than mine.”_ _

__Hongbin smiles politely. “It’s nice,” he yawns. “I don’t really take baths though, it’s a shame the tub isn’t being used.”_ _

__“Well you won’t have to worry about that anymore. I am certainly going to be making use of that tub!” He yells behind him, heading back to the bathroom to dry off his hair. He takes his time, even as the exhaustion begins to seep in, and by the time he’s done Hongbin is actually asleep briefly, eyes fluttering and cheek pressed into the couch._ _

__He shakes Hongbin awake, then picks up his duffel bag and wordlessly follows him through another door beside the bathroom. He’s let into a spacious room, monochrome in color scheme as much as the rest of the house is. There are pops of green from potted succulents and the anime figures that have taken over the bookshelf, but the rest of the room from the bed to the closet range in shades of gray. It’s a little depressing, he has to admit, but the bed looks especially big and comfortable and Jaehwan is all but ready to crawl into it._ _

__“Wow, this room is pretty great,” he says, dumping his bag and flopping face down into the neatly made bed. It’s just as soft and pillowy as he imagined._ _

__“Actually, this is my room.”_ _

__Jaehwan’s heart almost stops. “Oh, fuck I didn’t mean to just flop on your bed like that—“_ _

__“Well,” Hongbin interjects. “It’s technically your bed too.”_ _

___Okay… sooooooooo…_ _ _

__“There’s only one bedroom in this apartment,” Hongbin practically whispers._ _

__“So there’s only one bed,” Jaehwan says slowly, his brain flipping after every syllable he says._ _

__Hongbin nods._ _

__“This is the only bedroom in the apartment.”_ _

__Again, Hongbin nods._ _

__“And we’re meant to share it?”_ _

__“I can just go sleep on the couch; it’s really not a big deal,” Hongbin says, already headed for a closet and starting to pull out an extra thick blanket. “It’s really comfortable, and you can have the bed until I figure out something else. We can probably move into a bigger space after the reception so we can have separate rooms.”_ _

__Jaehwan’s heart is pounding, but he stands up and grabs Hongbin’s wrist before he can bolt. “That’s—that’s not a good long term plan. Let’s just—”and he can’t believe he’s about to suggest it— “share the bed. I don’t want either of us to wake up with back problems and there’s plenty of room for us to share the bed? I’d hate to make you leave your own room on my behalf, I’d rather be the one to sleep on the couch.”_ _

__Hongbin shakes his head, wringing the blanket in his hands. “No, really, I couldn’t let you sleep on the couch. That would be terribly rude of me.”_ _

__Well, that only left them with one option._ _

__“Let’s just share it then,” Jaehwan says firmly, rolling himself off the bed. He takes hold of Hongbin’s wrist and pulls them back. “I refuse to let you sleep on the couch and this bed is more than big enough for the both of us.”_ _

__Hongbin is stiff as he’s dragged onto the bed. The confusion is clearly written in the lines of his face, but Jaehwan crawls beneath the covers and turns away before he can read any further. They’ve transformed from strangers to roommates to roommates who casually share a bed in the span of less than a month and it’s all a strange experience and somewhat extremely terrifying. He doesn’t know if Hongbin is happy, but after a few moments, he gets up to turn the lights off and Jaehwan assumes that maybe, at some point, they’ll get used to it._ _

__Or maybe they’ll move later into an apartment with two bedrooms. And they’ll be publically married in front of just about everyone they know but they’ll come home and maybe they’ll just act like strangers in the same living space. Maybe they’ll be friends, and maybe not much more._ _

__The thought is a little chilling. Jaehwan wiggles beneath the covers and pulls them tighter around himself to keep himself from shivering. The room fills with the sounds of their breathing for a long time, and it takes quite a while for Hongbin to fully relax. Jaehwan lies awake for a little after that before falling asleep himself._ _

__

__

__Living together is a strange experience._ _

__Hongbin is an obnoxiously early riser and Jaehwan is not. Hongbin takes his showers in the morning and Jaehwan groans as the noise wakes him up before his alarm goes off. Hongbin grabs a granola bar and rushes out the door to work while Jaehwan drags his feet through the apartment, blindly searching for clothes in places he’s not familiar with and shows up to work an hour late and starving. They see each other around the office now that Jaehwan has also moved into the Allied Tech headquarters, but they give each other tired smiles and nothing else. Hongbin is home earlier, eating dinner if he can manage it or otherwise passed out on the couch. Jaehwan is up much later, taking his time with eating takeout and munching on his snacks as he sprawls out on the plush carpet in front of the television and plays his 3DS._ _

__“I think he’s an alien,” Jaehwan says. “I think I’ve been sleeping with an alien.”_ _

__Seokjin gives him a hefty sigh on the other end of the receiver. “Please stop calling me during work hours to tell me a line off the X-Files. I’m your secretary, not your marriage counselor.”_ _

__Jaehwan frowns, sinking into his chair. “Oh come on,” he whines, “you can’t sit there and tell me that he’s not an alien! Who in their right mind goes to the gym in the morning? Also he never leaves a speck of dirt in the apartment and he doesn’t have breakouts, like, ever. His skin is too perfect. He also doesn’t do anything to his hair and it’s all floofy and soft. You can’t tell me that shit isn’t magic.”_ _

__“Jaehwan, that doesn’t mean—“_ _

__“His favorite snack is grapes! Fruit! That’s a clear indicator he’s an alien!”_ _

__Seokjin’s sigh over the receiver crackles a little. “So he’s a normal human being who is clearly much cleaner and organized than you and was blessed with better genetics. You still have four more hours in the office, please stop calling me to tell me these things.”_ _

__Jaehwan picks at the skin of his fingers. “Who else am I supposed to go to with these things?”_ _

__“No, you’re right,” Seokjin says. “I know this is rough on you. It’s probably just as rough on Mr. Lee as well. Imagine having your space invaded by a parasite that sprawls out on the floor, leaves messes wherever it goes, lives almost entirely on junk food, and spends at least one hour a day on their 3DS playing Pokémon Sun.”_ _

__He feels a little bubble of guilt pop in his stomach. He presses his lips together and mumbles, “Well it’s not like my baby Vulpix can take care of himself,” and then line goes silent. He can hear the clicking of keys from the phone line, then Seokjin puts the receiver down and talks to someone who had approached the desk. Jaehwan can hear his heartbeat in his ears and the skin of his thumb starts to bleed after he picks too much._ _

__Somewhere deep down he knew that Hongbin was probably more uncomfortable with him than he was with Hongbin. Having that realization come to the surface felt like a leaden weight on his chest._ _

__There’s shuffling on the other end of the line and Seokjin picks up the receiver. “Okay, I know you’re pouting over there so I’ll tell you what: the wedding is over in two days. I’ll ship you something you can try to both enjoy together. I know all of this is difficult, but keep your mind open and try to reach out to him some more. I’ve been in talks with his secretary and he’s probably still just shy.”_ _

__He ponders a little more on it, anxiously biting down on the edge of his pen. “You’re right,” he says, feeling the dismay well up in his throat. “I’ll—I don’t know—can we pick up like a fruit tart on the way home? I think Hongbin might like it, at least.”_ _

__Seokjin chuckles softly. “Of course. I’ll put in an order for one now. Focus on your work and we’ll pick it up on the way home.”_ _

__“Thank you, Seokjin,” Jaehwan says. “Also, please tell my mom to stop texting me about my tux and the reception flowers, I really can’t tell the difference between slight variations in color anymore.”_ _

__“You know I can’t do that.”_ _

__“Pleeeeeeeeeeeease, Seokjin?”_ _

__“Goodbye, Jaehwan. Please finish your work for the day.”_ _

__With a small click, the line goes dead and Jaehwan carelessly slams the phone into the dock. Speak of the devil, his phone goes off with a flurry of texts from his mom about the specific shade of pink for the flowers and who is going to sit where in the reception hall and everything is such a disaster that everything is going to be ruined if he doesn’t devote his full attention to making the fake wedding perfect._ _

__He groans, puts his phone on silent, and manages to get a solid amount of work done in two hours. After that, his phone begins to ring with calls from his mother and from Hongbin’s mother and he tries not to let his frustration through from the sound of his voice. It is sweet relief when Seokjin knocks on the door to come pick him up, and they’re on their way home after making a quick stop at a local bakery just about to close._ _

__He’s surprised when he opens the door and finds Hongbin already in the kitchen cooking dinner. Hongbin looks sheepish and nervous as he flits around the stove and the cabinets, trying his best to put words together and talk. “I’m cooking dinner,” he stutters. “It should be done s-soon.”_ _

__Jaehwan kicks off his shoes and shuffles into the kitchen. Instantly his stomach growls from the scent of fettuccini alfredo with shrimp and broccoli. He finds himself grinning excitedly as he sticks his hand in the pot and swallows back a shrimp. “This tastes amazing!” he says awkwardly around a mouth of hot shrimp searing his tongue. “I brought home fruit tart for after dinner.”_ _

__Hongbin takes the bag from him and eagerly peaks into the box. Jaehwan’s heart flips as a sparkle of delight takes over his features. His eyes brighten and he’s smiling like a child, and that eases a lot of the weight in his chest. “I love fruit tart! Thanks for bringing it home.”_ _

__Jaehwan smiles and unexpectedly ruffles Hongbin’s hair. Neither of them react, or point out that it had happened, but it feels weirdly normal afterwards. He gets busy setting up the table with the food and they don’t turn on the television while they eat to fill in the usual awkward silence between them. Instead, Jaehwan talks on end about how busy his work is and Hongbin laughs along when he dives into drunken antics from university. Hongbin is a patient listener, never interrupting him and always visibly engaged with his stories. It’s rare for Jaehwan to find someone who would listen to his ramblings, but Hongbin is all smiles and bright eyes and for once seems totally unbothered by their living arrangement and the reception in two days’ time._ _

__When Hongbin leaves to clean the dishes, he finds himself smiling, a comfortable warmth taking over his cheeks and a laugh despite it all bubbling out of him._ _


	2. Chapter 2

The day of the wedding begins like any other day. 

Except that Jaehwan wakes up beside Hongbin for the first time. Hongbin is wide awake and flushed to the tips of his ears, distractedly pulling out his phone from beneath his pillow and messing with it. He stutters out a pleasant, “Good morning,” like it’s any other day of the week and he’s soon to head off to work. Jaehwan feels himself burn beneath the covers, hot with the last images of Hongbin’s soft gaze and the unstressed look that had only been fleeting. He pulls the comforter over his head and curls up on himself. 

“It’s too fucking early,” he groans. _This can’t be happening,_ he means. 

Both of them had laid awake last night for longer than usual, anxiety burning like fire in their chests. The flames ate away at the bones that held them together until they slept from exhaustion, never saying a word to each other as they slipped into a sleepless dream. Jaehwan was beyond tired, and Hongbin looked as if he were too, but something about this shared misery made them feel a little more comfortable as Hongbin’s cell phone went off. 

Hongbin picks up the phone and rolls out of bed. Jaehwan rolls a little bit in the lingering warmth that’s left before dragging himself to the bathroom. 

They eat breakfast separately because as soon as Jaehwan is out of the bathroom Hongbin rushes in to take a shower, somehow still on his phone with his mom. Jaehwan is too hungry to wait but decides that if today is so fucking special then he may as well make the effort to cook pancakes. By the time Hongbin is out of the shower, Jaehwan has finished his breakfast and cleaned up the dishes.

“Oh, wait,” Hongbin says, stopping him on his way to the bathroom. He cups Jaehwan’s face with one hand, licks his thumb, and wipes away the syrup clinging to the side of his mouth.

And entirely unsure of what just happened, Jaehwan stares blankly back. 

“Just, uh, didn’t want you to be embarrassed or anything,” Hongbin says, turning on his heels and walking off into the kitchen to eat the pancakes left for him. 

Jaehwan turns on the water so hot in the shower it leaves his face red long after the steam has cleared from the mirrors. 

They get two more phone calls separately from their moms before heading out for the same car. It’s silent for the whole ride, mostly because Jaehwan drifts off to sleep for most of it and he still isn’t exactly used to Hongbin’s secretary Gongchan. He wakes up when they arrive, realizing too late that he’d slept on Hongbin’s shoulder at some point and feels like already burying himself beneath the ground. 

His mother, with no tact at all, rushes up to him outside the hotel’s high class salon and says, “Sweetheart, your cheeks are so flushed! Do you have a fever?” while cupping his cheeks and feeling his forehead and neck. 

He burns even more and swats his mom’s hands from his face. “I’m perfectly fine,” he mutters, not looking up to the gaze he knows is burning his shoulders. 

He doesn’t see Hongbin for the rest of the day after that. They’re pulled off into separate salons to get ready for official photos as they sign marriage certificates. Jaehwan spends the time anxiously fiddling with his phone, chatting up the hairdresser to distract himself, and continuously talking his mom down because no, everything is not a disaster and yes, everything is actually fine. 

His hair and makeup are finished by noon and he’s absolutely not allowed to eat anything that could ruin it which means he’s hungry and grumpy by the time he goes into his final tux fitting. Hongbin isn’t anywhere to be seen but Jaehwan counts his blessings. His stomach has been churning and bubbling and maybe it’s from not eating properly but a fleeting thought makes him think Hongbin would make it worse. 

By the time all the final preparations are done, it’s nearing the late afternoon where he’s led into a grand conference room. It’s decorated from top to bottom to an extravagant degree. Flower banners line the walls with blessings from allied companies and rich families. There’s a glint of gold everywhere in the room from the table linings to the golden cuff links of the businessmen standing along the center aisle. At the front of the room is a large table with overflowing golden flowers from the center and a paper on the table. A city official stands behind the table, his family on the left and Hongbin’s on the right. 

As soon as he enters the room, there’s a flurry of movement and shutters and flashes as all the reporters surrounding the outskirts of the room take a stream of photos. He’s careful not to show his anxiety in his hands and with all the poise and confidence he’s learned to fake on the outside he walks to the center table and stands tall. The cameras continue off, the clicks louder than his thoughts, as he stands there and smiles pleasantly. 

His father and his brothers are smiling proudly beside him, but he doesn’t know if it’s fake like his smile is. 

Stiffly, he turns to shake CEO Lee’s hand, who stands by himself on the other side of the marriage contract. He looks rather jovial for the occasion and passes him a very sincere smile and pat on the back of his hand. It warms him a little bit, even through the persistent headache starting to build up. 

And then Hongbin arrives, and for just a moment it’s like the world stops. 

Hongbin is dressed impeccably in the sleek tux he’d been fitted for. The jacket fits snuggly around his broad shoulders, as if he’d somehow taken up more physical space in the room. His white collared shirt beneath only just hides the definition in his chest and abs, but the combination of the shirt and jacket increase the defined curves of his biceps. His slim black tie is dressed up with a golden flower pin at the bottom, drawing Jaehwan’s gaze down to his fitted black slacks that hold to him well as he stays frozen in that moment. 

He looks like a model straight from a magazine. And his first glance hadn’t covered the way Hongbin’s hair had been styled back from his forehead and the sleek, minimal makeup around his eyes that gives him a much more intense, strong look. In the breath that it takes for time to start moving again, Jaehwan feels all too much at once. 

Maybe the nerves really were getting to him. 

When Hongbin comes to stand beside him, he catches a whiff of the soft floral cologne that he instantly loves. He’s certainly dressed and styled as well as Hongbin with a similar black tux that hung neatly to his curves and certainly seemed to do him justice and makeup and hair to blow just about anyone away, but Hongbin didn’t look as flustered as he felt inside. He stumbles to pick up the golden pen on the table and nearly fumbles in front of the entire world watching on. His hand is shaking as he signs the marriage documents, the city official behind him sounding like a buzz in his head. He doesn’t even hear that it’s over, just startles when the papers are taken from his vision and he’s staring at the white cloth of the table. 

Hongbin brings him back, takes his hand in what looks like an official handshake to the rest of the world but it carries the weight of real comfort. Hongbin squeezes his shaking hands with his own that now, Jaehwan is belatedly realizing, probably haven’t stopped trembling since this morning. He gives him a smile that means that he’s there, sharing his nerves and their uncertain futures. He exudes a confidence and strength that Jaehwan had never seen before, that comforted him like a shield among the strangers watching on. 

And then the ceremony ends. They leave first, their hands lingering before they walk side by side. 

They’re surrounded by a whirlwind of photographers and news outlets trying to get in just one question with them. _How long have you two been in a relationship? What’s the next step from here? Will you both be heirs to the Allied Tech throne? How do you feel about being married?_ The last question makes Jaehwan cringe, subconsciously gripping Hongbin’s hand tighter. If he’d noticed, Hongbin doesn’t show it. He smiles politely, projecting the pristine image of the perfect son, and leads Jaehwan off into the main reception hall. 

The reception itself is less like a normal wedding reception and more of the usual business party. There are tables set up like it’s a wedding reception and the decorations make it feel like a wedding reception, but most business elites in the room are conversing among each other with champagne glasses in their hands and noses upturned to the competitors that walk by them. When Jaehwan and Hongbin enter the room, all falls silent for a breath before the room fills with the deafening sound of claps. Their smiles are robotic and forced as the newlyweds walk by, heads bowing politely only for the sake that someone of higher wealth and rank passes them by. Jaehwan can see among them that those that had been turned away by his family’s company do not meet his gaze or even look in his direction; they simply nod deeper in Hongbin’s direction and pass him with an even more pleasant smile. 

Jaehwan thinks nothing of it. His stomach feels like its filling with noxious acid as he takes a seat at the table in the front of the room and looks among all the business elites both scorning him and adoring the puppet show he’s playing. 

_It’s fine,_ he thinks. Hongbin grips his hand tighter, and it feels a little more believable that things will be fine. 

Their moment at the center of attention never seems to end. While they sit at the main table, they are approached by business leaders that hope to make their name known for the new heirs. Jaehwan is practiced in smiling and pretending that he has any actual sway in company decisions. He makes pleasantries and pretends to remember people’s names as they congratulate him and tucks away the animosity that builds in the pit of his stomach. 

As time passes, Hongbin looks visibly more flushed. He doesn’t deal as well with the people that come up to speak to them, voice trembling as he stutters through his own thoughts. Jaehwan calms him down by taking his hand, also flashing his status to the more obtuse and rude businessmen, and it seems to work decently well. Hongbin stutters less and his hands stop shaking when they’re called up for their first dance, but his face is still decently flushed when the cameras all line up around them to begin obnoxiously taking photos. 

Jaehwan is not much of a dancer, but Hongbin is at least better and takes the lead in the waltz. “Not bad,” Jaehwan whispers under his breath, narrowly missing stepping on Hongbin’s toes. “Where’d you learn to waltz?”

“My sisters taught me,” Hongbin says, smiling genuinely. For the first time the entire night, he looks entirely relaxed and at home. “They love ballroom dance, and they needed a partner.”

“That sounds… adorable, actually,” he replies. 

Hongbin leads him through a complex step, his hand gripping tighter around his waist when he threatens to slip. “I’m sure they’d be more than happy to show you all the photos and home videos of me falling flat on my face,” he says, ducking his head as a flush takes over his cheeks.

Jaehwan laughs softly, “I’d love to see it sometime.” He means it genuinely; just the thought of Hongbin as a ten-year-old in a small tux and hair cut poorly and styled messily by his sisters makes him smile on its own. 

Hongbin pouts at him, and then purposely steps on his feet as they turn. “It’s just so awful. Please, spare me,” he huffs. 

In the middle of their turn around the room, he lifts Jaehwan’s arm up and leads him into a twirl. It’s unexpected, and Jaehwan almost takes a very public dive into the ground, but Hongbin catches him by the waist so tightly. Jaehwan feel his heart stop, like Hongbin’s fingers had curled around the center of his chest and held his heart in place. All breath leaves him, all words on his tongue just poofing into thin air, all thoughts in his head dissipating without a trace. 

“I-I’m sorry,” Hongbin stutters, helping Jaehwan steady himself and then continuing to lead him through the end of the song. “I should’ve warned you I was going to do that.”

It takes far too long for Jaehwan to regain enough composure. “No, it’s fine. I didn’t eat dirt so I’m sure no one noticed,” he says. Even if anyone had noticed, his head is still spinning so fast that he can’t really feel anything except how hard Hongbin is still holding onto him. 

When the song ends, Jaehwan finally feels as though he can breathe again. Hongbin whispers something to him, but he can’t hear it over the roaring in his ears. The crowd is clapping and he finds he has enough focus to let Hongbin lead him back to the front of the room and take a seat at the main table. 

The rest of the night passes in a blur; everything pales in comparison to when they had danced. Hongbin’s flush seems to stay on his cheeks even after they’ve finished dancing, and his anxiety seems to morph into something else that Jaehwan can’t quite name. After a reasonable amount of time passes, he motions Seokjin over to ask him to pull a car around for them to leave. He doesn’t miss the way Hongbin seems relieved. 

They slip beneath the radar in leaving, though no one had really continued to pay attention to them anyway. Jaehwan slips into the car first, tugging Hongbin behind him. They simultaneously heave a breath of relief as they begin to pull away from the hotel. Hongbin dozes off on the way home, and Jaehwan doesn’t think twice when he pulls Hongbin’s head to rest on his shoulder. He lets it be until they’ve pulled up to their apartment and he has to, regrettably, wake Hongbin. 

His hand brushes Hongbin’s cheeks, and he realizes that he’s oddly warm. Hongbin doesn’t seem to notice as he sleepily stumbles out of the car and into the elevator, but Jaehwan begins to wonder just how long Hongbin’s been hiding it, if he hadn’t been feeling well all this time, if all of this had just brought him to the point of being physically ill. 

He bites down on his tongue and tries not to think too much. Hongbin undresses as soon as they enter the apartment, throwing off his shoes, his jacket, and his tie onto any surface in a trail to the bedroom. He drops his pants on the floor and flops into bed, passing out almost instantly. Jaehwan smiles fondly and undoes Hongbin’s white button up, hands hardly trembling as he works the buttons apart. He properly tucks Hongbin beneath the covers, tidies up after him, and slips into the bathroom. He spends a longer time than usual in his skin care routine, as if the more times he scrubbed his face would erase the heat in his cheeks at the memory of Hongbin holding him tight. 

 

 

Hongbin ends up with a fever the next day. “It’s just out of stress,” he says, looking blearily around the room, still standing tall in just his boxers. “It happens all the time.”

But Jaehwan refuses to listen. He makes Hongbin go straight back to bed with medicine and a bottle of water and spends the rest of the day trying to figure out if a Cooking Mama recipe for porridge would actually work and if Hongbin would like it. 

(Hongbin does. He scarfs it down without blinking an eye and moaning appreciatively after every bite. Jaehwan sits on his hands, on the new burns and cuts on his fingers and warms with the appreciative smiles.)

There’s a small black box on the kitchen counter that Seokjin had stopped by to drop off earlier in the day. He takes it out and shows Hongbin the two wedding bands they’d been given. Hongbin, without thinking, takes one ring and asks for Jaehwan’s hand to slide it on. His laugh is drowsy, his eyes still clouded, and he giggles at the shocked face Jaehwan can’t seem to wipe off. 

“You’re cute when you’re flustered,” he says, moving to take the second wedding band and sliding it onto his own finger. 

Jaehwan periodically pats his face for the rest of the night, wondering if he could have caught a fever that quickly. 

 

 

Things begin to settle down after the wedding. They’re given two days off before heading right back into work where all their tasks had piled up in the days that they were gone. They start leaving for work together and coming home at the same time, which throws them off a little bit. Really, both of them are working less and Jaehwan counts it as a blessing. It makes living together just a little easier when they’re not as stressed and exhausted, never finding space from one another. They find different ways to take up space in the apartment, and in the following month, they find ways to take time for themselves and spend time in each other’s amiable company. 

What Seokjin had sent him was a videogame. Specifically, Persona 5 with an Amazon printed note on it that says ‘Have Fun :P’. Neither of them know anything about it, and Hongbin has to stop after work to actually buy a PS4, but Jaehwan makes it a point when they start that they do it for an hour or so after work. 

“Seokjin says its 100 hours long, at least,” he says. He doesn’t tell Hongbin that it’s specifically so they could bond over something. 

However, it turns out to be quickly addicting. The combat is easily in Hongbin’s style of gaming, though not quite as active as Overwatch it certainly has its own way of keeping him on the edge of his seat when they take down the first palace. Jaehwan takes over in the dating-sim game style of spending the days in school and with the protagonist’s friends. They genuinely commit to an hour a night (if not more when the action starts to pick up) and it integrates almost seamlessly into their daily routines.

It’s nice to have something that they can enjoy together. 

“Did I already run through this floor?” Hongbin asks. They’re perched side by side on the couch, blankets haphazardly strewn over their laps in the dim light of the living room. Jaehwan has three snack packages on his side of the couch, popping a piece of chocolate into his mouth before squinting at the television. 

“Yeah, you did. Turn back around, make a left at the wall, and then head down into the next bank catacomb,” he replies around a mouthful of food. 

Hongbin does as instructed and ends up in the next section of the map, another underground bank vault with even more puzzles. He concentrates as he watches enemies march along the map, taking note of their movement patterns before rushing into the mix. “Kaneshiro’s bank is a nightmare,” he groans, getting suddenly ambushed by a shadow and heading into combat mode. “I can’t believe we’re taking physical notes just to remember the code to unlock the central safe.”

“Agreed,” Jaehwan responds. “I could just look this shit up on my phone.”

Hongbin grins. “But that wouldn’t be nearly as fun.”

“Exactly!”

They sit back in comfortable silence as Hongbin reaches the end of the bank vault. Jaehwan takes down notes of the code revealed and putting it together for Hongbin to unlock the next part of the map. It takes them six floors of this before they unlock the central safe, wherein the boss fight will be revealed after the protagonists have sent a calling card. 

Hongbin sinks back into the couch, reaching absent mindedly over Jaehwan’s lap and pulling a chip out of the canister. “I’m tired, and it’s your turn anyway,” he sighs, passing the controller over. “I need some happiness right now, let’s hang out with Ryuji until the time limit ends.”

Jaehwan smiles and eagerly begins clicking through the story’s phone log. “Roger that, captain!”

He makes sure to spend all available day time with Ryuji, who had ended up being their favorite character. Jaehwan spends all the day time after school attempting to romance Ryuji, then spending the evenings with any other confidant. The end of the time limit quickly approaches, so he sends out a calling card and triggers the final boss phase for this section of the game. 

“Do you want to try taking Kaneshiro on?” Hongbin asks, once again reaching over Jaehwan’s lap for another chip. 

Jaehwan pouts at the thought, fiddling with his glasses a bit. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to try, right?”

It does hurt, actually. In a few different ways. He hadn’t really thought much about what this portion of the game was trying to tell until the main villain spelled it out. 

_Those in power work the ones below them to the bone for money. Such is the hierarchy of the world… Now it’s my turn to profit on everyone else. I’m going to swarm all over you… and squeeze out every last penny!_

It hit a little too close to home. His heart tightens up as the villain screams his monologue at the top of his lungs. The boss battle begins, but Jaehwan feels like a snake had coiled itself around him, constricting him ever so slowly, and the pressure continues to build as he clicks through menu options and battle spells and they do next to nothing. 

Hongbin presses a little closer to him, their shoulders and thighs brushing. Jaehwan can feel the heat radiating off of Hongbin, and if Hongbin’s hand on his over the controller had been meant in comfort, he doesn’t say anything to indicate so. 

“Calm down,” he says. “This boss is probably weak to ice spells. Equip a demon persona too so that you can nullify physical damage for yourself.”

It has a calming effect in a lot of ways. Jaehwan sucks in a deep breath and manages to play it out. He gets heated when he mis-clicks and almost throws the controller out of shock when the villain’s piggybank steamrolls his party into the ground (Hongbin is scarily stoic, frozen in the realization that they’d have to restart from the week previous if they lost because he didn’t make enough save files). They’re yelling and cheering, almost jumping out of their seats as they deal the last attack and the palace begins to crumble around the villain. 

“Fuck yeah!” Jaehwan yells, dropping the controller. He holds out for a high five and Hongbin meets him with an enthusiastic smile. 

“You did it! You beat your first boss!” he says. He plops back down on the couch and pats the space beside him. “Let’s watch the rest of the cutscenes and finish this palace for good.”

Jaehwan wedges his way beside Hongbin onto his space in the couch and feels a strange, comforting warmth start to seize around his heart. 

 

 

With a large government contract deal on the rise, there are a lot of stakes. 

Both of them work tirelessly for the next month trying to put files and cases together, standing tall in board meetings against intimidating businessmen and putting together presentations in foreign languages they’re only at a passing comprehension. Work days are stressful, and even if going home together and playing videogames takes some of the edge off, it usually falls short of just enough. 

It happens just two weeks before the proposal submission.

Hongbin was meant to give a presentation about the influence of new cellular emission towers and the implementation of a national wireless data service in ten minutes and Jaehwan was running late. He wasn’t even supposed to be present at the meeting, but Jaeho had come down with something serious and Jaegwan was on a business trip in LA. That left Jaehwan with a few hours in the morning to study up on the subject and panic about how none of this was really his expertise. Hongbin had been stressed about this meeting too, but he’d been talking about the contents with him over the last few days and that had been a very gracious help when Jaehwan was studying up on terms he didn’t quite grasp. 

Then the printer had broken down and both of their secretaries had seemingly disappeared. The presentation packages with notes on the contents needed to be printed, so Jaehwan had sprinted to the copy room to take care of it for Hongbin. No use in stressing him out any further, he wasn’t meant to be doing a lot of talking in the presentation so he could at least take the time to put together the presentation notes. 

He’s on his way back from the copy room when he bumps into someone, sending the papers flying. It’s like watching a snowfall in slow motion, the papers drifting through air as they spill over the ground. His chest seizes for a moment before he collects himself and starts frantically picking up the papers. 

“I’m so sorry,” he apologizes profusely. He keeps his gaze down and bows deeply, then bends down to delicately pick up the papers so as not to crumple the pages. “I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. Please, if there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

A deep, menacing chuckle sounds over him. Like a cold dagger had been shoved through his back, he stumbles forward onto his hands and freezes entirely. The ice spirals through his veins, his blood running cold as the laugh echoes through his ears. His heart clenches; he recognizes now who he’d run into.

CEO Shin, owner of Technical LLC and a long-time partner of Jaehwan’s family company. He was one of the most ruthless businessmen among the top elites and currently stood as one of the wealthiest men in the country. CEO Shin was a brutal manipulator, scheming his way through fraud scandals and coming out on top no matter what the disaster. His greed was endless, and Jaehwan knew that he would do anything to satisfy his greed. 

Of all times, now was probably the worst to run into him again. 

“Oh, there’s so much you could do for me,” CEO Shin sneers, gazing sharply down at him. “What a coincidence that I run into the Lee’s littlest son. You looked just stunning at the wedding; I wonder how much money your father received when Allied Tech bought you for their son.”

Jaehwan cringes, feeling rage and shame swirling in his stomach. His hands are shaking, fists tightening that he crumples up a presentation document. From below, CEO Shin looks like a monster with blazing eyes threatening to eat him. 

“So scary,” CEO Shin continues, his tone condescending and making his presence as suffocating as possible. “You know, I lost a lot of money when your father tanked his company. Certainly not even a decent portion of my wealth, but I have sorely missed out on that trip to Mexico I would have spent it on. Surely it would be bad word if it got out that the newest prince of the tech family was pushing around and threatening their elders in the industry. I’m sure you could think of something to make it up to me.”

The rage bubbles hot in his stomach, his temper flickering like flames though his whole body. Retorts begin flying through his head—insults, jeers, anything that would get into this fucker’s head and shut him up for good. He’s mad, angry that someone could talk down to him like this. His father would disapprove, but Jaehwan refuses to let shit like this slide. 

He sucks in a deep breath, reigning in his rage. But he reaches out to collect the last stray page and foot comes down on his hand, the weight increasing and increasing until it slides beyond the boundary of uncomfortable and slips into painful. He bites down on his tongue, he wants so badly to scream and yell so that someone would walk by and see the horrendous behavior of this fucking bastard. Yet the more he tries to wiggle his hand free, the harder CEO Shin digs his heel into the back of Jaehwan’s hand. 

He doesn’t want to look up. He doesn’t want to see the grinning face of that bastard that thinks he’s won. He refuses to let him win this. 

There’s a quiet click of footsteps, and Jaehwan glances to see the same familiar shoes always tucked away neatly by the front door. “Quite unsightly behavior, CEO Shin,” Hongbin says. 

Jaehwan breathes a sigh of relief as CEO Shin’s foot slides off his hand. He collects the last paper and stands tall next to Hongbin, shoving his throbbing, shoe-printed hand into his pocket. 

“Mr. Lee! What a surprise to see you here! Oh, how I am so happy that you will soon be the rising star of Allied Tech! Such a bright boy—and oh, your wedding was just beautiful,” CEO Shin grovels, words tumbling out of his mouth as fast as he can manage. He dips his head in respect to Hongbin, spewing out as many praises as he can in a minute. 

Jaehwan has never seen Hongbin look even remotely angry, but now he looked furious and Jaehwan was genuinely intimidated. Fists clenched and shaking by his sides and mouth pressed into a thin line like if he didn’t hold himself back, he’d actually punch CEO Shin. His anger is like a steaming kettle that could blow its top any moment. 

“Save it,” Jaehwan says, grinding the words through his teeth. He’s looking directly at Hongbin, who suddenly doesn’t seem to register his words. Instead, he takes his injured hand where he’d hid it and delicately wraps it around Hongbin’s fist even though it hurts. 

Hongbin whips his head to look at him, eyes blazing with a raging fire. The heat is so palpable, the anger so overwhelming it’s almost suffocating, but Jaehwan takes comfort in the heat to the ice still stiffening his body and manages to nudge Hongbin towards an empty conference room. 

Hongbin plants his feet in to the ground for just a moment. “CEO Shin, if you have any issues please take them up directly with me. I will not stand for abuse like this—to my company and to my family. Please watch yourself, for there are disastrous consequences,” he grits out. He gives a bewitching, devious smile that’s scary enough to leave CEO Shin visibly shaken. 

But he lets go of his anger there and lets Jaehwan drag him off into a conference room. When the door clicks softly behind them, locked, both of them sag against the door.

“Holy fuck,” Jaehwan says, pressing his hand to his chest where his heart is racing a mile a minute. “I can’t believe he did that.”

Hongbin bolts up and suddenly begins to flit around the conference room. “I’m so sorry I didn’t come sooner!” he apologizes. “That never should have happened. I knew CEO Shin was going to sit in on this meeting but I didn’t think he’d… do that do you. I thought I kept a first aid box in here, but I’ll go run back to my desk and grab it!”

Jaehwan unlocks the door and Hongbin runs out like he’s running a marathon. He puts his weight against it again, taking a moment to stare down at his hand. There will surely be a bruise there tomorrow in the shape of a heel, but there’s nothing more serious than that. He can still see the imprint of the sole on his hand, the intricate engraving of designer shoes. The back of his hand is a mash of splotchy reds and purples, but his fingers are still okay to move even if it makes him wince when he does. 

He sucks in a deep breath, letting his eyes flutter shut in the silence surrounding him. That had been way too scary. 

Hongbin comes back a few minutes later, sheepishly holding a massive first aid kit behind his back. “My secretary is actually a huge klutz,” he says, pulling Jaehwan to sit in a chair in front of him and setting to work on opening the case. “It certainly has been put to good use, I suppose.”

“You don’t have to take care of it, really. I could do it myself,” Jaehwan responds, using his good hand to try and reach for some of the bruise salve in the first aid kit. His hand is shaking (how long had it been doing that?) and he drops it by accident. 

But again, Hongbin surprises him and lays a steady, warm hand over his. “Let me do this for you. And you can tell me how you’d like to get back at CEO Shin.”

The thought of it makes him smile. Hongbin wasn’t being oppressive, wasn’t saying that he’d take care of it and all Jaehwan had to do was sit back and look pretty. He was saying that they’d do it together, under Jaehwan’s rules, and that was already far more than he could ask for. 

Hongbin is delicate as he works. He’s gentle rubbing the bruise salve into the back of Jaehwan’s hand, careful not to press too hard but working just as diligently. He takes care to wrap Jaehwan’s hand up in a bandage, tight enough to stop the pain but nothing tighter. He pulls Jaehwan’s sleeve over most of the bandage and slides the cuff link back into his suit.

He smiles after his work is finished, and after Jaehwan had finished explaining his ideas at revenge. It’s nothing like the menacing, devious, and enraged smile of before. It’s his usual, gentle smile, like when he eats something that Jaehwan had taken the time to cook for him. 

Jaehwan feels his heart throb as painfully as his hand does. 

“It’s not too tight, right?” Hongbin asks for the third time. 

Jaehwan shakes his head, eyes catching the glint of Hongbin’s wedding ring. “No, it’s perfect,” he sighs. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, and I’m sorry… again…”

Jaehwan lays a comforting hand on his shoulder, squeezing it out of the emotion that he can’t quite name welling up in him. “It’s okay. Let’s just go tackle that presentation and call it a day.”

At the mention of the presentation, Hongbin seizes up again and his intimidating presence disappears in a flash. “Oh my god, I totally forgot. We’re going to be late if we don’t run over now!”

Jaehwan can’t help but laugh as Hongbin pulls him to his feet and starts booking it to the main conference room. He keeps up one step behind, both of them bursting through the conference room door out of breath and with smiles on their faces. The room murmurs around them, but nothing seems to beat the happy skip in his chest as he begins to pass out the presentation documents and Hongbin stands tall at the front of the room, sending him a subtle wink as he walks by.

 

 

When they make it home that night, they eat takeout pizza (and Hongbin eats a fucking salad) and play more videogames. Jaehwan pulls out his Nintendo Switch from storage and they play Mario Kart together while plotting ways to take down the greedy evil boss CEO Shin. 

“It’s almost like we’re the Phantom Thieves!” Hongbin says, a blinding smile taking over his whole face. He’d leaned into Jaehwan’s side somewhere between the racetrack turns and Jaehwan just hadn’t moved since his heart had started skipping beats. 

In return, he ruffles Hongbin’s hair and challenges him to another race, looking for any way to distract himself from the disheveled, flustered look Hongbin has. His mussed up hair and flushed cheeks flash through Jaehwan’s head that he loses the next three races and would’ve tossed the controller out of frustration if his hand hadn’t throbbed painfully at the thought. 

 

 

After the proposal submission is finished and the decision comes back a month later that Allied Tech had won the government contract, work begins to get a lot more hectic. They bump into each other at the office, sharing documents and exchanging papers before running off to the next meeting. They have their hands full with tasks, meetings, presentations, off-site visits, and lab oversight sessions, but going to their apartment at the end of the day starts to feel like coming home. It feels a lot easier to bear the burden of the company when they can talk about it together. 

They’ve slid into their routine of playing Persona 5. Jaehwan watches on as Hongbin runs through Futaba’s desert pyramid palace on the way to the major boss fight. It’s relatively out of the blue when Jaehwan asks, “Okay, so what’s your favorite Pokémon?”

Hongbin cocks his head curiously. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason really,” he says. Except he’s been wondering for a while just now deep Hongbin’s nerd runs. 

Hongbin pouts for a moment. “First gen? Or any generation?”

“First gen only. Let’s keep it simple.”

Hongbin purses his lips in thought, eyes narrowing at the television. “I’m not sure I can remember all of them off the top of my head, but I guess I’d have to say Arcanine? Or maybe Rapidash.”

Jaehwan thinks for a fleeting moment of the fire he’d seen in Hongbin’s eyes. Far too apt choices. 

“Alright, my turn to ask a question,” Hongbin says, triggering a small shadow battle and taking his attention off the game for a moment. “What’s the name of your Animal Crossing village? You’ve never told me.”

Jaehwan flushes, suddenly fidgeting. He’s had the same Animal Crossing village name for years and well…

“I’m not telling you,” he huffs, crossing his hands over his chest.

But Hongbin knows by now how to get Jaehwan to do things. He puts down the controller and pushes into Jaehwan’s space, pulling his knees onto the couch and leaning forward onto his hands until he’s just a few inches from Jaehwan’s face. He makes his eyes big and round and pouts dramatically. “But you’ve taken care of it for so long, it would be a shame if I didn’t know such an intimate detail about you,” he almost purrs. 

The sound travels straight to Jaehwan’s spine and makes him shiver. And that’s all it takes for him to cave. He begrudgingly mumbles, “Konoha. I named it Konoha after fucking Naruto.”

But Hongbin doesn’t laugh, doesn’t tease him. He smiles, turns his attention back to the game, and says, “That’s pretty cute.”

Jaehwan feels himself burn to the tips of his ears. “O-Okay, next question!” he stutters. “You’re trapped on a desert island and you can only bring one food with you, what do you bring?”

Hongbin chuckles, “Don’t you mean what thing I’d bring with me?”

“No, I meant what I said. How else are you going to eat cake on a desert island?”

Hongbin stifles a full laugh behind his hand. He starts a cutscene and gazes back at Jaehwan. “I’d bring that fruit tart you brought when we first started living together.”

Jaehwan frowns, thoroughly puzzled. “But why? I wouldn’t say it was the best fruit tart I’ve ever had. I can definitely bring a better one home next time.”

Hongbin hums and simply shakes his head. “It wouldn’t be the same,” he says. A light blush takes over his cheeks. “The one you brought was better.”

Jaehwan doesn’t think on it for long. The game begins the final boss battle and both of them are panicking at how fucking massive the final boss is. They’re yelling when every hit lands on Futaba’s massive cognition bird mom and clutching at each other when Ryuji gets taken down on his way to the giant crossbow to take down the boss from a distance. Jaehwan’s heart is racing and he doesn’t know how tight he’s holding on to Hongbin until there’s only a few hit points left on the final boss and Hongbin shoots up from his grasp. 

“Hell yeah!” he cheers, almost throwing the controller across the room. 

Jaehwan laughs and sits on his hands, hoping that Hongbin thinks the flush on his cheeks is just from excitement. 

 

 

The game takes an unexpected turn, and somehow their relationship does too. 

They hadn’t known what the next story arc was going to be, and it had hit them in the face when they realized the next protagonist to join the team, Haru Okumura, was trapped in an arranged marriage set up by her father for political gain. His father and her fiancée were corrupt pieces of shit, but right from the beginning, the story arc didn’t sit well with either of them. 

The first discordant note strikes Jaehwan towards the beginning of the arc as Haru’s father, the CEO of a fast food chain, calls her into his office. 

_I hope things are going well with that young man. He may not look like it, but he is the heir to a powerful political party. He’ll eventually become a necessary connection for this company—or rather, for me._

Jaehwan doesn’t hear those words in the character’s voice, but in that of his father’s. 

_That’s how a son of Lee Technologies should be._

He’s silent as Hongbin plays, picking nervously at the skin of his fingernails. He’s trying hard to keep up appearances and pretend that he could shove his feelings down, but time and again every time they confront the villains of the arc, he curls himself up smaller and forces himself to drown out the voice of his father. 

How much Hongbin notices of that, he doesn’t know. Hongbin isn’t stupid though; he picks up on it eventually. 

“Should we take a break?” he asks, patting Jaehwan’s knee. “You’re not looking too hot.”

Jaehwan grits his teeth plasters a smile. “No, I’m fine. It’s been a rough couple days at work and we definitely need a break.”

Even though he’d said it, he was still waiting for it to feel like a break. 

The second discordant note strikes them both, and they find themselves gripping the blankets and pillows in their laps with all their might to hold back their anger.

The confrontation between Haru and her fiancée makes their stomachs roil. The fiancée takes Haru in a vice grip and mocks her. He shakes her around, yells in her face about how she is nothing without him—that she is his and only. They couldn’t stand hearing it, and Jaehwan almost knocks the television over when he throws a pillow at it. 

_The truth is… I—_

_Don’t wanna get married, right?_

The third note sinks into their hearts like a mad pianist slamming their hands on the piano keys. It’s cacophonous and sad, so full of anguish that both of them are stunned into an uncomfortable silence. 

Hongbin begins the boss fight with the fiancée’s cognitive shadow. The CEO rants on and on about squashing those beneath to rise to the top, and it sounds just like every other elite they meet with daily. The corrupt business practices, the smothered scandals, the secrets that would never see the light of day—they knew it all. 

_Father! You want me to be that man’s plaything just so you can satisfy your own ambitions?_

An eerie silence befalls them despite the background noise of the boss battle beginning. Hongbin drew his entire focus into it, as if that could distract from the maelstrom of thoughts in his head. Jaehwan lets the silence consume him, the lines blurring between character voices and that of his own. 

“Screw this guy,” Hongbin mumbles, dealing another magic attack that the boss sucks up to heal itself. Jaehwan doesn’t really hear it anyway. 

They sit in awkward silence even as the boss battle ends and the characters continue debriefing. They don’t even talk as Hongbin runs through the palace’s space airlocks, puzzling through them on his own, right up until the route to the treasure is secured. 

He passes off the controller without a word, and Jaehwan, hardly noticing, fumbles with it until it drops in the gap that had grown between them. 

“Did you think like that?” Hongbin asks, his voice not much louder than a whisper. At first, Jaehwan can’t decipher whether Hongbin had meant to say it aloud. But nothing comes after it. 

He bites down on his lip, carefully thinking of what he should say next. “Like how I could have been married off to a jerk face for political gain? Can’t say it didn’t cross my mind. After all I am just—“ _the prop son_ he almost says aloud. He clamps his mouth shut and distractedly looks anywhere else but Hongbin. 

“No… I meant—“ 

“My father is not a monster. He wouldn’t have just married me off to someone like that—someone who would be scrabbling at our heels for personal gain,” he rambles. “But I can’t deny that my father would have sought gain from any arranged marriage, only if it ensured that I would have my own freedom.”

Hongbin pauses the game screen entirely, silencing the background music. “What about you? If you knew this arranged marriage was going to be for personal gain, why did you accept it? Why—“

Jaehwan interjects, “Look. I don’t have as much power as you may think I do. I was third in line for Lee Technologies—I would never see a piece of the company no matter how hard I worked. I was always meant to be the public face, the handsome and approachable face that could trick the public into thinking their data was safe in corporate hands. When our company crashed, the burden fell on me to pull it back up even if I would never gain anything from it.”

Hongbin falls silent, nervously fidgeting with his hands. He sucks in a deep, audible breath and lets it out. Even though Jaehwan couldn’t meet his eyes, Hongbin had never taken his eyes off of him. 

“What if you find someone that you fall in love with?” he asks. 

Jaehwan lets out a bubble of cynical laughter despite the clenching weight in his chest. “Why would it fucking matter anyway? I’d be damned if a scandal came out of it.”

Hongbin finally rips his gaze away, and Jaehwan regrets his words as soon as he’s said them. He scrambles for anything to say to ease the piling tension in the room. “It’s not that I’m not happy,” he blurts out, his heart feeling like it’s swelling in his chest. “All of this has been fucking weird and even if we’re like planets running in separate orbits, there’s always a few places where we crash into each other and I can’t even describe how happy it makes me when I can talk and not have anyone tell me to shut up. You are an irreplaceable—“ _acquaintance? friend? roommate?_ “—fake fiancée and I count my blessings that it turned out to be you and not someone else.”

He’d said it all without thinking, just blurted out whatever came next to his mind, and now that he’s said it he panics that it must’ve sounded so fucking strange. Hongbin hasn’t said anything for a long stretch of time and Jaehwan panics with the need to fill up the silence with something, anything…

Hongbin finally meets his gaze again and smiles, but Jaehwan knows by now that it’s only mostly sincere, somewhat fabricated. “Good, I’m glad that you’re happy here,” he says a little robotically, but the sentiment flashes away as soon as he unpauses the game and directs all his attention towards it. 

The air stays heavy and tense through the rest of the night, past when they decide to shut off the game and head for bed. Jaehwan spends a much longer time in the bathroom in his skin care routine that when he steps back into the bedroom, Hongbin is curled up on his side of the bed and fast asleep. Jaehwan carefully crawls in beside him, but it takes him a lot longer for him to sleep. 

Where did this leave them now?

 

 

If everything could have been smooth sailing, that would have been too nice of a dream. The planets that seemed as though they would crash had spun out into different galaxies, crumbling with every impact against the debris in their course.

They bring up the topic again, as if to resolve the awkward feelings still drifting in space, but the atmosphere just doesn’t feel the same. They discretely spin their wedding rings when the damage racks up and prays for something to knock them back into orbit.

And yet, it’s like they’ve hit an asteroid belt and the debris begins to spin their course out of control. 

There’s a huge crowd of paparazzi and news reporters stationed outside the back entrance to Allied Tech. They swarm around the car as soon as it pulls up, their questions muffled against the glass windows and lights flashing through the darkly tinted interior. 

Hongbin looks over curiously, confused, but Jaehwan has no clue what’s going on either. 

They brace themselves for the worst of it, stepping out through the same door and pushing side by side through the brusque reporters. Most of them are yelling questions that they can’t make out over the general noise and the lights flashing in their eyes. Not even their secretaries can ward them off, until a few shove too hard and manage to knock Hongbin onto the ground and corner him. 

“Could you comment on the recent data breech into Allied Tech’s servers?”

Hongbin looks up shocked, the clear rushing fear in his eyes like a cornered animal about to be shot. Jaehwan feels himself burn and picks Hongbin up, gripping his hand tightly, gazing once over that he hadn’t been hurt otherwise. He bodily shoves the reporters away until they’re at the back door. He turns on his heels to address them all simultaneously. 

“We have no further comments. Please await a proper press release before trampling us. All inquiries should be forwarded to the current CEOs of Allied Tech,” he seethes, carefully controlling his volume. It manages to stun the reporters long enough that they physically begin to back off. 

He doesn’t wait around. He pulls Hongbin into the building behind him, ditching their secretaries, and drags him into the nearest empty office room. 

“Oh my god, what is going on,” he says, frantically looking through his phone and finding that no, no one had texted him and he hadn’t been receiving messages on some _data breech_. The bruise still lurking on his hand throbs where Hongbin had held onto him with all his strength, but he pushes the pain into the back of his mind.

Hongbin looks as flustered as he feels while flicking through his phone and hurriedly shooting off text messages. “I have no clue,” he says. He flits around the room, pacing, staring at his phone for only a minute. Without another word, he bolts from the room before Jaehwan can even catch his hand. 

He doesn’t see Hongbin until the end of the day, feeling like he’s trying to catch sand with open fingers with just how fucking difficult it is to corner him at work, but he gets pulled into a conference room by his older brothers and they debrief him on the situation. 

Someone had let the company’s personal server information leak, the passwords and encryption keys to access the line connecting databases and hard drives full of personal information of clients as well as the company’s stored internal documents like finances and back end code. The hacker hadn’t necessarily done anything more than peek into the servers and leave their mark there, a bug that crashed access to their website, but that didn’t mean the hacker couldn’t do more in the future. 

It hadn’t been anything more than a taunt. _I could ruin you if I wanted_ the message rang loud and clear. 

“In the hacker’s note posted to the site in the crash, they claim the attack to be one to expose weakness in the system’s current structure, but I don’t believe it for a fucking second,” Jaeho seethes. “They wouldn’t have done such a public stunt if it was just that. No, that was a move to prove that they could take action if they wanted and that we should be wary if we don’t follow their rules.”

Jaehwan doesn’t know how to respond to that. Not that his brothers ask his opinion in the first place. 

The day is spent in board meetings with engineers on designing way to strengthen security of the servers and with panicked stakeholders who yell every time they realize the threat of losing their investments. Jaehwan doesn’t handle most of them face on, instead watching from the back of the room and guiding his brothers to find the correct response when a shareholder gets particularly angry at the state of things. Sometimes being uninvolved in the main business front has its perks, though he’s sure he’ll have his own problems soon enough. They haven’t slapped down his public address script yet. 

Regardless, he’s exhausted by the end of it. Seokjin tells lets him know that a car has pulled out back and that Hongbin still has work to finish so they will be heading home separately. 

He makes a valiant effort at shoving down the ache in his chest; he can almost pretend it doesn’t hurt. 

He stress cooks, which means he actually looks up a recipe and gives himself two hours to actually try to cook something more than pasta or an omelet. He manages a decently nice baked chicken with all that chicken breast that seems to continuously fill up the freezer. It goes cold, and Hongbin still doesn’t show up. He flicks on his DS and plays Pokémon Sun for an hour and still there’s not a sound from the door. Even when he sits to eat by himself at 9PM, no one busts through the door with a relieved smile on their face at the wonderful smell of home-cooked food that Jaehwan had spent a lot of time on and had a few new cuts on his fingers to show for it. 

The vegetables taste bitter in his mouth. It was even more of a shock to himself that he had cooked vegetables and was actually eating them. 

He swallows down the food, sets aside a nicely organized plate for Hongbin and leaves it in the microwave because that would probably keep it a little warm. Deciding that the day had been rotten enough, he decides that fuck it, he’s going to take a steaming hot bath today and he’s not going to give a fuck about anything else. He even plunges into his bath bomb storage, pulling out his favorite one that looks like a rocket ship and swirls around blues and greens in the tub before he plunges in and buries himself beneath the surface. 

“Fuck,” he curses underwater, watching as the bubbles float to the surface and pop. The bath was helping, but it sure wasn’t enough to erase the ache in his chest and the bruising on his hand that he couldn’t stop staring at now that the concealer had washed away in the blues of the bath water. 

He hears the front door open at some point, but he stays in the bath until the water goes cold. He even tries to stay in the bath longer by draining it a bit and filling it with some more hot water, but he sneezes and finally decides that he has to get out before he catches a cold. Not that a cold would be the worst thing in the world at this point; he could use a day off right now—or really any excuse to let everyone else handle this without him. 

But, fine. He was an _adult_ and he could be mature about this too. 

He pulls himself out of the tub and takes his sweet time blow drying his hair and following through with his skin care routine. He can hear things being knocked around in the kitchen, but nothing other than that. By the time he’s finished and his skin is nice and moisturized and wonderfully smooth, he drags himself out of the warm steam still floating around the bathroom. The change in temperature makes him shiver. 

He glances into the living room, but there’s no sound of the television and no sound of the microwave. All the lights had been turned off, save the one by the door which they always leave on. He peeks into the kitchen and, just as he’d suspected, Hongbin’s dinner was still sitting in the microwave untouched. He huffs, because somehow he expected this, and he marches off with the full intent on reprimanding Hongbin on not eating properly and not managing stress properly and they both need to be able to handle this oncoming storm. 

The bedroom door was open, a familiar pile of clothes on the desk, and Hongbin was asleep in bed with his jaw hanging open. Knocked out completely, sleeping like the fucking dead. 

He sighs, really he should have expected nothing less. Hongbin probably had a worse day than he did. He would let this go, only for today! He would not let Hongbin sleep without skipping meals like this again, even if he fell asleep into his food. 

He pulls the covers up around Hongbin, stares at his face until the world blinks out around him, and awkwardly crawls into bed trying not to wake him up. His heart feels like it’s spinning off course into the void of space, and he vaguely wonders if he could even catch it when it disappears among the stars behind his eyes. 

 

 

As if someone had stuck a knife into the crack to wedge it apart further, nothing seems to heal the fissure that had grown between them. They spend the next few days in separate meetings, missing each other at home and falling asleep without saying a word to each other. It doesn’t crack completely, because Jaehwan always leaves food out for Hongbin and Hongbin always leaves a note of thanks on the counter where the dish had been, but that’s all they say to each other between the days. Jaehwan’s phone feels like it blows up constantly, and even if Hongbin did text him he wouldn’t see it between the panicked texts of his coworkers and the stern texts from his father and the ever doting, pleading texts from his mother to please take up a post marriage interview because it would be good for the papers and they’d just look so adorable plastered to the cover of every magazine in Seoul. 

(He does check his messages from Hongbin, but there’s nothing there. Once he watches the little dots in a gray bubble pop up, but they disappear within seconds.)

It’s five days after the data breech before they’re finally in a meeting room together, sitting side by side in an awkward attempt at presenting the final plan of public reaffirmation to investors. He doesn’t get a chance to even ask how Hongbin’s week had been because he keeps pacing in his personal office, anxiously tugging on his suit and glancing out the window like a helicopter would crash into their sky scraper and save him from presenting. He looks like he’d rather hole himself up in a corner and hide than give this presentation. 

So Jaehwan steps up, follows the path of Hongbin’s pacing, until they’re both by the bookshelf where he can corner him. Hongbin turns around and immediately flattens himself against the wall, going stiff and eyes frantically darting around. 

He’s trying to look at anywhere but Jaehwan’s face. He can’t say he’s not hurt by it a little.

“You’re going to wear through the floor at this rate,” he says, stepping even further into Hongbin’s space. “Tell me what’s going through your head.”

Hongbin gapes for a moment, mouth working around words he’s trying to formulate. Jaehwan can see his brain stuttering to an abrupt halt, his voice dying out before he can say anything. He slumps against the wall in defeat and drops his gaze to his feet. 

Jaehwan backs up then, loosely takes Hongbin’s wrist and pulls him over to the plush grey couch on the other side of the room. Electricity still crackles at his fingertips and he has to shove his hands in his lap in hopes it will stop. “Take a second, calm down, then tell me what’s bothering you.”

Hongbin sits there and twiddles his thumbs nervously and Jaehwan wants nothing but to slap his hands together and shake him until he talks. He can see the way Hongbin’s mind is running a mile a minute trying to pull his thoughts together. Hongbin sucks in a few deep breaths, and even then it still takes him a few minutes to settle his anxious fiddling and talk. 

“I don’t know that I can deal with this,” he starts, eyes flickering around the room. “I haven’t slept well in a week and I’ve gone through this lecture maybe fifty times but I know that as soon as I get up there in front of those menacing investors they’re going to unleash all the pent up rage from the minor stock market plummet—on top of all the rest of the money they’ve lost and I don’t know that this plan is going to work and—“

Jaehwan lays his hands on Hongbin’s, even if the electricity crackling through his skin hurts. “Slow down, take another breath,” he murmurs. Hongbin stutters to a halt, takes a moment to process, and finally sucks in a breath. It comes out as a shaky exhale, but it’s a start. “You’re nervous that this plan isn’t going to work, right?”

Hongbin nods slowly.

“And you’re nervous that this burden has fallen on your shoulders.”

Again, Hongbin nods. His gaze drops to his hands.

Jaehwan does just as any shoujo sports anime protagonist would do: he claps Hongbin’s cheeks between his hands. Hongbin looks up, finally meeting his eyes. 

“If this doesn’t work, we innovate. That’s how it works in this industry,” he says. “There’s nothing that’s perfect, no infallible plan and no right answer. This is the decision that the engineers and the marketers and designers have come up with after spending days on this project, doing everything they can for this company. Your job is to honor their work, share what the best solution is after we’ve all spent so much time going back and forth and arguing for one side or the other.”

He takes a moment, thinking, then squishes Hongbin’s cheeks a little harder just to watch them puff up like a baby’s. His cheeks are warm, but not enough to be feverish quite yet. “You are going to be the leader. They’ve put all the work in, and it’s up to you to believe in that work and sell it to the investors. They believe in you, so you should believe in yourself too.”

Hongbin shakes himself, wiggling out of the cage of hands. “You’re right,” he sighs. “I mean I’m still terrified out of my fucking mind, but you’re right.” He manages a small smile, flushed to the tips of his ears.

And somehow, just like that, it felt like a star had collided into his orbit and sent him spiraling back into place. 

He takes Hongbin’s wrist again and pulls him into the official meeting room. He watches from the back, and just like he had expected right from the start, it goes off without a hitch. 

 

 

The plan was quickly set into motion once it had the approval of the investors and shareholders. Allied Tech would use saved funds and funds from the recent publicity of both the marriage and the data breech to do an entire reset and update of the system. Throw out old server logins, passwords, domain registrations, and cloud storages kept in excess of hoarding client information. They’d replace the whole system with a new two-step authorization system, encrypting the server access, ensuring back-end backup to their official website like creating programs to monitor those accessing the page’s code, and modifying cloud storages with encryption keys and firewalls to prevent the theft of information. 

It was a lot, but Hongbin had sold it well to the investors who could have very well sneered in his face. This would make it right by their clients, ensure the protection of their data and prevent a takedown of their company if they had followed in the same steps of Lee Technologies.

(It stung, but Jaehwan couldn’t deny it.)

The plan involves putting out contracts for smaller companies to do the encryption, and that was what had sold many of the investors in the plan. Where there stood more opportunity to make money, to buy a contract that their company could handle, their eyes flashed golden with greed and they drooled at the idea. Notes and voicemails were being left at all hours of the day so that they may put themselves in the mind of the two rising CEOs of Allied Tech, as it was exhausting trying to handle just that much. If that were all of it, Jaehwan would gratefully deal with it and call it a day and go home. 

But they were spending a lot of time at the office, mostly in Hongbin’s since it was bigger, trying to wrap their heads around the economics and technicalities of it all until they were practically falling asleep in each other’s lap. They struggled through it, talked together, whined about wanting to go home, and somehow the fact that it felt like they were locked in a room together managed to begin to heal the fissure that had started to form between them. 

It wasn’t enough, but it was a start. 

But it was a given that not everyone would be on board with the plan; if that were the case, Jaehwan would be more concerned with a space-time continuum opening and fucking with Earth. It was plainly clear who wasn’t on board, as CEO Shin stood proudly in opposition and rallied some of the strongest shareholders to settle themselves as a wedge in the plan. He wanted more money funneled into the contract his company would receive. He wanted _all_ of the contracts from the start, and he didn’t hesitate to indicate that he would start up a boycott of the company if they denied him the contracts. 

It wasn’t said in so many words, more that CEO Shin simply had to snicker through the presentations and raise his hand to ask demeaning, patronizing questions. He wanted to show that he had the upper hand, and it made the young CEOs itch to strip him of his power and, at the very least, ensure his grubby hands never touched their company. 

Jaehwan sighs, flicking through some folders before tiredly letting his head drop on his desk. Today would be another long evening, and all he really wanted was to go home and sleep. The bags were starting to show under his puffy eyes, and Hongbin wasn’t looking much better than him. 

He peeks over the edge of his desktop, wholly unsurprised to find Hongbin sleeping on his couch, head pillowed by stacks of files and the document he’d been reading fluttering to the floor. As silently as he can manage, he takes the small fuzzy throw cover on his couch and tucks it around Hongbin’s shoulders. His cheeks are warm but not feverish, and Jaehwan lets out a relieved sigh. 

He takes the file Hongbin had been working through and sits back down at his desk. The sun slips into the horizon behind him and still, he finds himself watching Hongbin sleep with ease. 

 

 

The plan is put into action with success, and Jaehwan immediately tells both Seokjin and Gongchan to give them the next day off entirely. Neither of them question it, and he saves the surprise until he and Hongbin drag themselves into the apartment after 3 nights of burning the midnight oil and living entirely on a diet of caffeine. 

“Let’s go the fuck to bed,” he grumbles, tossing off his tie and jacket and not caring where they land. “I got us the day off tomorrow and we are sleeping in until noon; I will absolutely not take ‘no’ for an answer Lee Hongbin.”

Hongbin lets out this sleepy giggle as he kicks off his shoes. He stifles a yawn behind his hand as he wiggles out of his shirt. “You’re a godsend, Lee Jaehwan,” he says. He tugs off his tie in one swift move and Jaehwan finds it suddenly hard to swallow. 

“You can worship me tomorrow. Tonight, we sleep!”

They’re out within ten minutes of changing into their pajamas and hitting the bed. Hongbin still wakes up first, but he’s up at 10 AM which is amazing all on its own. Jaehwan gets up somewhere around 1 PM and his stomach immediately grumbles in thanks at the sight of lunch.

“So, we’ve got a day off. What would you like to do?” Hongbin asks, sipping from a cold glass of water as he watches Jaehwan devour an entire plate of pasta. 

“I certainly don’t plan on leaving today,” he mumbles around a mouthful of food. “My poor village has been missing me, the guilt has been eating me up inside!”

Hongbin hides a laugh behind his hand. Jaehwan’s stomach flips—probably from eating too fast. Yeah, that was definitely it.

“I’m going to take a very long, very hot bath. Then I’m going to catch up on all the manga chapters I missed. Oh, and then I’m going to eat a whole bag of snacks while doing a sheet mask,” he says, humming thoughtfully around smaller bites of food. 

Hongbin smiles and says, “Sounds like a wonderful plan. I might just head to the gym for a little bit, but if you’d like we can play some more Persona 5 tonight.” 

Jaehwan could feel his heart swell. “Let’s do it!”

He tackles his to-do list one by one. After scarfing down lunch, he hops into the bath long enough to wrinkle the pads of his fingers. The smell of roses from his bath bomb lingers as he dries his hair and changes into track pants and a baggy shirt. Hongbin had disappeared to the gym at some point, but that meant he could play his DS at full volume and didn’t hesitate to take hours taking care of his village as well as work on catching some of the legendary Pokémon. 

Hongbin is back by sunset, light on his feet as he steps through the door and greets Jaehwan with the usual pleasantries that he still hasn’t quite dropped yet. It’s cute, especially as his cheeks flush pink as he says it and smiles charmingly. It never failed to stun him in moments like these that Hongbin was could only be either an actual Disney prince or straight out of a chaebol drama. 

He shakes the image out of his head, rolling himself off the couch and taking down a mess of blankets. He could smell Shake Shack from a mile away and he was ready to devour again. Oh, how Hongbin knew him so well. 

When they turn on the PS4 to play together once again, they fall into a comfortable silence. Hongbin does all the fighting and Jaehwan takes care of raising up the social links. It’s fairly silent compared to how they were in previous game sessions, but Jaehwan tries not to be deterred by that thought. Everything in the past needed to be set behind them if they were going to keep up appearances well. 

The boss fight of Haru’s palace is deadly silent between them. Jaehwan still can’t shake the shadows clinging onto his heels, but he looks to Hongbin getting excited by the fight and finds a little solace. Even when CEO Okumura shouts that Haru should cut off the rest of her friends for personal gain, and a deep, striking, freezing cold fear crackles in his veins from the tips of his fingers, Hongbin had inched closer to him and the subconscious warmth was enough to keep his focus.

Well, it kept his focus on Hongbin. That was okay too. 

The boss fight ends, and Hongbin is excitedly vibrating in his seat with so much happiness. They had done it again! That is, until, the Mysterious Figure had shown up to kill CEO Okumura. 

Their mouths simultaneously drop in horror. 

The true plot was beginning to unfold. High political figures in the public prosecutor’s office revealed to have asked the Mysterious Figure hitman to take out CEO Okumura’s Shadow, finish off their connection and hide their tracks. Even if it meant the death of someone, who cared. This was all for political gain and traction in the world, and the villains would do anything to get it. Not even the characters’ trip to Disneyland in celebration of their new team could drown out the roaring in their ears as they watch CEO Okumura succumb to his death. 

_Isn’t everything going a little too perfectly_

Hongbin is the first one to get up. He saves the game and then turns off the console. His smile turns down at the corners. “I’m going to head to bed, if that’s cool?”

Jaehwan waves him off with a heavy heart. “I’m going to do a sheet mask, and I certainly can’t have you watching me,” he teases, even if it falls a little flat. “Go on, I’ll be in bed after I catch a few more Pokémon.”

Hongbin smiles, and again it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Good night,” he whispers softly, crossing his arms as if to hold himself closer before shuffling off to bed. He doesn’t wait around for Jaehwan to say anything in return. 

Finding it too much effort, Jaehwan doesn’t go to get a sheet mask. He rolls back up on the couch in a blanket and pulls out his DS, deciding to play through another Pokémon map. He plays for hours, losing track of time until his eyes can barely stay open but his heart is still too erratic to let him sleep peacefully. 

He closes his eyes and thinks, drifting off somewhere in between thinking that nothing could ever be perfect. 

 

 

A couple weeks later finds them working through two separate international contracts. They were minor in scale, small business companies in China and America asking for servers and IT services in order to store large scale data. It feels like they’re beginning to drift off again, but there’s a gravitational pull just barely keeping them in orbit. 

Suddenly, out of thin air, their international contracts fall through the cracks. Both of them drop a notice that they refuse to stay in communication with Allied Tech. They could not work with such a dishonorable business, and they refused to put their data in the hands of those who do not take all necessary precautions to protect the clients’ data. 

Data protection was the foundation of modern technology, in no uncertain terms had the contractors said. And just like that, the jobs fall through their open fingers. 

It puzzles them until they are sent a flurry of texts and emails, messages from unknown numbers and threats, so many threats, about another data breach that they were hiding. The whisperings started in a low murmur—Allied Tech had another data breach but were covering it up because their stocks couldn’t take another hit. Then the whispers became murmurs that transformed into gossip and soon became full protests outside of Allied Tech’s door and calls to boycott the company unless they came out with a public statement addressing whether they had been hacked again. 

The young CEOs are pulled into a meeting room for a breakdown of the situation. There had been a new break into the system. The hackers had somehow gotten access to all the new login types—had received specific notes on the changes to the system and bypasses to the firewalls and encryptions on the servers. The hacker had tried to release the data of hundreds of thousands of people, everything from their street addresses to their resident registration numbers, but the breech had barely been contained by a last minute failsafe set up by the engineering team. An alarm had triggered as the data was about to leave the server, and the hacker had removed all traces before they could be discovered.

There were very few people who had been let in on this issue, CEO Lee wanting to keep it under wraps since nothing had truly happened. There were even fewer who had the detailed information on the new security measures since the last breech. 

Jaehwan looks into the eyes of his father from across the conference table, feeling his chest suddenly well up with panic. “We need you to give a public address on the situation,” he says calmly, as if something like this was just a trivial matter. “I’ll have the legal team oversee the writing of the statement and you will present it in a press room in two days.” 

He sits on his shaking hands. “I’ll take care of it,” he says. 

That is his purpose, after all. 

He hardly sleeps in that time, going over the document with the legal team over and over again until it reads like a teleprompter every time he closes his eyes. He spends hours at work trying to get his speech perfect, pick out the holes in the argument and address it with the legal team. He runs it by Seokjin about twenty times before running it by his brothers. He practices until the words blur, but doesn’t find any solace in sleep when he startles awake in a cold sweat, his ears ringing with shouts and protests and evil laughter as a dark shadow digs its claws into his ribs and pulls him into the darkness. 

Hongbin all but disappears in that time, making himself scarce. His heart reaches out for comfort once, but he stomps on that hand as the pressure comes back in a wave threatening to swallow him. 

But his public statement still derails quickly. After he’s given the facts and reported the current state of the company and the current measures they are taking, the reporters begin to peg him with questions he can’t answer. They drill him about the technical things: how much information could have been stolen, how did the hacker do it, how did a company of hundreds of engineers and data technicians not know how to stop one hacker. His brain whirls as they peg him with the responsibility. He is the biggest face they know; therefore, this is his fault. He should have done better. 

He swallows around the lump in his throat and plasters on a smile. He does his best to finish the conference, and all but bolts to Seokjin behind closed doors, at it is Seokjin who is the only one waiting for him. 

Seokjin gives him a somber smile, leading him down into the lobby and out the back door where the car awaits. At some point, it had started raining. Jaehwan is soaking wet and shivering by the time he’s in the car. 

“You did well,” Seokjin says, starting the car and blasting the heat. 

“No I didn’t,” he says, swallowing around the tears building behind his eyes and the lump in his throat because fuck it, this was the one thing he was supposed to do and it hadn’t gone well. “You don’t have to lie to me.”

Seokjin pulls out and starts on the journey home. “You know that I wouldn’t lie to you,” he says. He glances back in the mirror sincerely. 

The tears fall anyway. “That was awful, what the fuck am I good for,” he grits through his teeth, wiping away every hot tear that rolls down his cheek. “They all pegged me for a criminal! I mean, what the fuck do I know! I don’t do anything for this company! I’m just everyone’s fucking plaything that they can prop up for whatever show they want to run.”

Seokjin doesn’t say anything, even after they’ve pulled up to the apartment. He keeps the car running until Jaehwan wipes his last tears. His face is red and splotchy, and Seokjin keeps seeing the flashes of much younger Jaehwan who used to sob much more loudly on his own. 

“You know better than to think you’re just a plaything,” he starts, his voice stern and his gaze hard enough to make Jaehwan look at him. “I don’t want to hear you putting yourself down like that. You did your fucking best and no one could do the job that you do.” He reaches over, tenderly ruffling Jaehwan’s hair. “Go home, take a shower before you catch a cold, and go to bed early. I canceled your morning schedule tomorrow, so I’ll come pick you up at noon. And don’t you dare look at any news articles about this, got it?”

Jaehwan gives a solemn nod, but climbs out of the car without saying another word. He hears Seokjin sigh behind him, but he bundles it up in the sad well of his chest and drags himself to the elevators. The apartment is empty when he opens the door; he’s not sure why disappointment floods like ice water through his veins but he shivers and figures he’ll get a cold. 

He goes through the motions like a puppet. He showers, dresses for bed, pretends to eat, and promptly crawls into bed. His eyes hurt as he falls into a dreamless sleep, wishing that someone could have held him in orbit as a meteoroid crashed into his side.

 

 

He carries his injuries, holding on to them as if they’d remind him that he was really a human and not a robot. Dealing with the aftermath of the impact seems to be harder than last time. 

He is left to public control, staring at hundreds of news articles on himself and the public’s reaction to Allied Tech’s statements. He was to do the research, gauge the opinion of the public on the company, and work with the development team to ensure that Allied Tech could still save face. The work consumed him, because he could never leave it at work and brought the stress home with him. He couldn’t focus when Hongbin would try to sit him down to play videogames or tried to push his DS into his hands. Hongbin had been dealing with his own amount of stress if the bags beneath his eyes were anything to go by, but Jaehwan didn’t bother to figure out what it was as he was too busy trying to keep himself together. 

It was like he had been standing back at the crash of his family’s company and watching himself crumble again. 

He stops seeing Hongbin altogether at work; they rarely see each other at home. They sleep at different times, go to work at different times, fall back into the things they like to do on their own, and don’t say more than formal pleasantries that still makes their skin crawl. Jaehwan cooks dinner once but Hongbin skips entirely, doesn’t eat it the next day, and he ends up throwing the food away. Jaehwan leaves his things around the apartment, not picking up after himself, and Hongbin feels the anxiousness build up in his chest as he frets around the apartment looking for an outlet to his frustration. They bare their teeth at each other for the stupidest things, biting every time they find something to gripe about. 

It was like watching a head on collision in slow motion. 

Jaehwan had tried to cook one more time—he desperately needed to put his anxious feelings to use and needed to keep his hands busy. He cooked chicken again with a side of roasted vegetables, and even felt a little proud of his work at finally getting the taste just right. 

But Hongbin comes home late, long after the dinner had gone cold. The silence in the apartment shatters, and Jaehwan walks into the kitchen to find the plate shattered on the ground, food splattered on the tiles, and Hongbin standing in the middle of the maelstrom. 

“I-I’m sorry,” he stutters, looking genuinely upset. “You worked hard on this and I just—I ruined it.”

Jaehwan shakes his head, even if the ugly darkness in his heart echoed that _it was ruined_. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, sliding into some house slippers and getting the broom out of the dustpan out of the closet. “You go on and take a shower. I’ll clean this up.”

Hongbin protests, “No, please let me clean it up! It was my fault that I dropped it and—“

“Just,” Jaehwan sighs, resigned and frustrated, “please go. I can take care of at least this much.”

Hongbin gives him a long, hard look, fists balling at his sides and shaking with the sheer force of keeping them closed. “Please just let me—“

“Shut up.”

Hongbin looks up, shocked and hurt. Jaehwan regrets it immediately, but he doesn’t back down. “Let me clean it up. I don’t want you hurting yourself on the glass.”

Like a cat who had been frightened, Hongbin bolts from the kitchen as fast as he can. Jaehwan sucks in a deep breath to collect himself before working to clean up the shards. 

He’d done something stupid. So, fucking stupid. There was no reason for him to have been so harsh with Hongbin—who hadn’t done anything wrong. But he was tired and upset and angry and sad all at himself and he just wanted one thing to go his way. He wanted one thing to feel right in whatever fucked up turn his life had taken. 

He wanted someone else to validate him, tell him he wasn’t just ‘the third son of Lee Technologies’ or ‘the fiancée of Allied Tech’s future CEO’. He wanted to be something useful other than taking a beating as the shield of the company. 

But maybe that was just a far off dream. He trashes the glass and the food, pulls out what leftovers were in the fridge, and shuffles back off to the couch. He pretends to be asleep when Hongbin walks by, but Hongbin doesn’t try to wake him up and pull him to bed. He tucks a blanket around him and slinks off into the bedroom. 

It takes Jaehwan a much longer time to push down the guilt crawling at the edges of his mind just so he could sleep. 

 

 

Jaehwan could see the impending collision, and yet he and Hongbin were glued to their gravitational orbits and impact was simply inevitable. 

The stress from work and the fact that they always seemed to be around each other in the worst times seemed to escalate the anxiety that thrummed through their veins persistently. After Jaehwan had given his public address, things had calmed down a fraction at the company. 

There were no longer strikes or calls for boycotting, but the news reporters refused to leave him alone. Every time he tried to leave or go out on his own, one way or another reporters would swarm him and press their microphones in his face and cameras in his eyes. He couldn’t walk outside without running into a reporter, asking for the smallest details that he didn’t fucking know, and it would be his own duty to deal with it. They closed in on him, like piranhas hunting prey, and he’d booked it into a small restaurant on the street, hiding in the bathroom until he was sure he had lost the reporters. His skin crawled every time he left the apartment and his heart pounded against his ribs when people walked too close to him. He still wasn’t sleeping well every time he was made to look up comments on the public address he’d given and he’d inevitably read the exposés on himself, that analyzed every single move and tick that he’d carefully crafted into public image perfection that they had used to rip him apart.

It was a constant reminder that he was there to take a beating so that his brothers wouldn’t have to, so that they could live their peaceful lives in full anonymity. His father had made sure that his brothers’ kids could grow up happily, but Jaehwan would never be given the same solace. 

It was getting to Hongbin too. The press would corner him, not nearly as frequently as they would with Jaehwan but they tried their damnest. But Hongbin, of course, was given a new security guard to handle it because his father wished to ease the stress any way he could. Hongbin had many other things to focus on, such as trying to re-establish trust among other companies and investigating how the information of the breech had been leaked specifically to the international companies that Allied Tech had almost secured contracts with. The work seemed to pile on, and Hongbin began arriving home later and leaving earlier—and then leaving whenever he wanted to be out of Jaehwan’s space. 

They argued over the small things, things they didn’t even care about before. They nit-picked at their differences until the hopelessness overtook them that _this could never fucking work_ and someone would stomp off in exasperation. The PS4 lay untouched because how could they even be in the same room when it felt like even being around each other was a fucking burden. It was like work, practicing to keep up appearances at parties. 

The collision’s catalyst was stupid, so fucking stupid. 

“Could you please pick up your clothes off the ground?” Hongbin yelled from the bathroom. “I’m tired of picking up after you.”

Jaehwan shoves his nose further into his DS. His Animal Crossing village was nicer because he never had to clean _that_. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do it,” he mumbles, curling up on the couch. His back hurt because he had been sleeping on it so often, but that was such a minor problem compared to anything else.

Hongbin huffs, frustrated. In all the time they had lived together, Jaehwan had never heard Hongbin sound so angry. “No, you left your clothes on the bathroom counter for two fucking days and you didn’t wash your dishes in the sink after you ate and you seem to be refusing to keep our _shared living space_ livable for a decent human being.”

Jaehwan shuts his DS, feeling the anger and stress start to bubble in his chest. “I’ll take care of it when I can. Work was bad these couple days and I need a fucking break,” he says, gritting through his teeth. He plasters on a sarcastic smile, but Hongbin seems to boil hotter beneath his skin. 

“I don’t want to hear it,” he says, his voice louder than Jaehwan’s ever heard it. “I can’t stand seeing clutter and garbage everywhere I fucking look, it’s making my skin crawl and you fucking know that! Quit being a baby and clean up your things.”

Jaehwan was seething. “Fuck off,” he murmurs, his voice low. His skin was starting to burn, his mind whirring into overdrive. Half of him said to shut up and just do it, cleaning was easy, and half of him was absolutely furious Hongbin had insulted him. “I don’t want to hear it from you. You’re not my mom and you’re certainly not my boyfriend, so you don’t get to tell me what to do!”

Hongbin retracts like he’d been slapped. “That’s not what I meant—“ he says, meekly pulling his hands to his chest as if to make himself smaller. 

But this planet was already set on its collision course and Jaehwan was so angry and frustrated that even if he saw it coming, it was too late to change tracks. “No, listen, that’s exactly what you meant. You must’ve been holding that in for some fucking time. Well, bravo to you for putting up with me for so long. Must’ve been a goddamn nightmare!”

Hongbin steps back, flattening himself against the wall as Jaehwan takes a step towards him. “I care about you, Jaehwan!” he yells, his hands shaking in front of him and his eyes sparkling with tears at the corners. “How dare you say I fucking don’t! I’m asking you to pull your weight in this house because I need a break too! Damn you, you’re not the only one caught in the crossfire here. You’re not even trying to make this work.”

Jaehwan feels his blood boiling beneath his fingertips. “You’re right, I don’t fucking care about this,” he says, and his whole body begins to scream. The bruise now fading from the back of his hand aches and his heart clenches and contracts around empty air. His lungs squeeze and his vision blinks dark for a split second. _LIAR, LIAR, LIAR,_ his head pounds, but his mouth is moving faster than he can catch up to it. He’s already closed his eyes to the wreckage he’ll cause. “This is all fake anyway! We’re not married, and be fucking astounded if we were ever at the point of dating because I would share more in common with a fucking rock. I’m nothing but a fucking prop to everyone, and I don’t fucking care anymore. Use me as your fucking show toy and then leave me the fuck alone.”

He retracts, the regret and guilt willing up so fast, but there Hongbin still was trying to reach out to him. “How could you even think that, after all the time we spent together?!” he yells. “You’re not like that at all, Jaehwan! So what if your father’s company taught you that’s all you are, they’re gone now! You know you’re worth more than that!”

Jaehwan cringes at the mention of his family’s company. Hongbin, realizing he’d stepped on a mine, tries to catch his wrist. Jaehwan swats his hand away and steps back. The chasm opens into the floor beneath them, an endless void of hurt feelings and angry misdirected comments that Jaehwan couldn’t seem to stop staring into. 

“Fucking hilarious,” he bites sarcastically. “I busted my ass off to pull my family’s company out of the dirt just so it would be a pretty package when our arranged marriage was decided. My whole life was just tossed to the side. Now I couldn’t even date anyone else if I wanted to because damn if I’ll let myself be the cause of ruin again.”

Hongbin stills, eyes glassy and hands trembling. “So you don’t care about me?” he murmurs. 

Jaehwan can’t help the sarcastic laugh that bubbles up from his chest. His cheeks are burning hot as he stares into the wreckage he’d caused. “What does it matter,” he says, despite everything in his being screaming at him to _shut the fuck up_. 

Hongbin lets out a sad chuckle, his head dropping in defeat. “I suppose this is just another burden on your shoulders,” he says. “Sorry.”

And then he wipes a stray tear from his cheek and bolts, making a dive for the bedroom and slamming the door behind him. Jaehwan’s body feels like it shrivels up as the intensity of the heat flickers out in an instant. It leaves him breathless, gasping for air, his cheeks stinging. He slides into the first pair of shoes he can find, the regret and the guilt threatening to make him sick, and he slams the front door behind him. He calls Seokjin without a second thought and hides in the apartment lobby bathroom until his secretary comes. 

The image in the mirror scares him, his hair wild around his splotchy, red face. His eyes were swollen; how long had he been crying? He’d bitten into the skin of his lip until it blead and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking not matter how many times he kept them under scalding hot water. 

Seokjin gives him a sympathetic, sad look when he crawls into the car, but takes him back to his apartment and calls the next day off. He lets Jaehwan take the spare bedroom without a word and shuts the door softly behind him.

Jaehwan doesn’t sleep much at all, the thoughts of fucking everything up making him cry again until exhaustion pulls him into the void some time when the sun begins to rise. He stared back at his shattered course in space, the debris that had been left behind, and vaguely wondered if the planets controlled by everything around them could ever heal properly.

 

 

Hongbin doesn’t go to work for two days. They don’t see each other for five, but even that long had been a blessing seeing as now they were going to be marketed as the young CEOs of the rising corporate world. 

The tension was palpable between them. Every time they sat side by side and pretended that things were okay, the tension was thick enough to smother every sound in the room. It was enough to fool the reporters, but not enough to fool anyone else.

Certainly not enough to fool CEO Shin. 

“The little love birds sure look like they’re having a rough patch in their marriage,” he says, looking down on the both of them where he stands. The conference room had emptied out, but he had stayed behind so that he would be the last person they bow to as he left. “Oh, but don’t worry, all marriages have a few rough spots. I’m sure you little love birds will solve your differences eventually.”

He ruffles Jaehwan’s hair, demeaning in his tone. “Such a pretty little puppet,” he says. “Oh! But if was this all just an arranged marriage for political gain, then I’m sure the public would have a much different opinion on Allied Tech. Losing ground in keeping people’s data safe? A shame, but now Lee Technologies had married into the company to influence its cheap tactics on such an honorable company? Oh, how the company’s reputation would tank,” he sneers. 

He saunters out of the room with a shit-eating grin like nothing had happened. Hongbin leaves without a word to stick up for him, and Jaehwan feels an uncomfortable heat flare in his back. The dumb wedding band burns on his finger, and he frustratedly pulls it off and shoves it into his pocket. 

What a fucking joke this was.


	3. Chapter 3

“You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”

Jaehwan curls up on the couch, tucking Seokjin’s spare throw blanket over his head. “I have no clue what you’re talking about,” he mumbles. The light of his DS is bright in his eyes, but he’d rather stare right into the face of his cute little Vulpix than into the harsh glare of his secretary. 

“You’re being a stupid idiot.” 

Jaehwan drags the stylist over his Vulpix, watching as it preens and lets off little hearts at the pets. “Am not,” he huffs. 

Seokjin makes a fast grab for the blanket and yanks it off before he can grab it, exposing him to the chilly air. Not even his fluffy flannel pajamas are enough to shield him from the icy glare Seokjin gives him. “I’m not going to argue with you about this. You need to go apologize to Hongbin and get your shit sorted out before Allied Tech takes another hit.”

Jaehwan slams his DS closed a little forcefully, the pleasant background music suddenly cutting off into silence. “I’m not going to apologize just yet,” he says, ignoring the feelings of his lungs contracting and the lump rising in his throat. “Call me a dumbass all you want but I’m not going back there until this fucking bullshit at the company gets handled.”

Seokjin crosses his arms over his chest, shooting him a very disappointed look. “That fight was your fault,” he says. “Fix it.”

He stomps off, grabbing his phone and keys and slams the front door behind him. Jaehwan begrudgingly reaches over the edge of the couch to grab his blanket and throws it back over himself. His sweet little Vulpix was still waiting for him, and her little hearts made him feel just a little bit better. 

He’d felt like shit since the fight. He hated the regret that ate away at him at night and the guilt that scratched through his heart every time he stepped into work. It had been a week since he’d left his apartment, and he knew Seokjin was tired of dealing with his bullshit by now, but he still wasn’t ready to go back and face the music. 

He didn’t know how to apologize for it all. He didn’t know how to put into words that their arranged marriage wasn’t a burden on him. Maybe he hadn’t been trying his hardest towards the end to make it work, but he had tried in the beginning. He regretted everything he yelled at Hongbin as it replayed in his head like flashes of a movie almost constantly. 

He didn’t hate Hongbin; how could he ever. 

But he hated the ugly envy that reared its head every time he thought about the life his brothers got to live. He hated the way he felt every time he felt wronged by his father and at the life he’d been raised in. He hated too that Hongbin didn’t stand up for him when CEO Shin had been in his face.

(He hated more than anything that he’d taken it all out on Hongbin, who hadn’t deserved any of it.)

He brings his attention back to his DS, distracting himself with a much bigger legendary Pokemon fight. He would capture Solgaleo, and then think about all of this stuff later when he had a much clearer head on his shoulders.

When that would be, well, he didn’t know. 

Seokjin, however, had other plans to speed that along. Outside the apartment, he decides to take a quick walk to the convenience store a few neighborhoods over and makes a couple quick phone calls. He comes back home after a few hours with some of Jaehwan’s favorite pudding cups and soft apologies for the way he’d stepped out of line as Jaehwan’s secretary and friend.

He smirks as Jaehwan eagerly digs into it. It’s an early apology for what he’d penciled into Jaehwan’s future schedule. 

 

 

Jaehwan wakes up with Seokjin shaking him. And that’s five seconds before Seokjin bodily hauls him off the bed and drops him on the floor. 

“You’ve got work today,” he says, throwing open the curtains with a flourish. The light that floods into the room immediately gives Jaehwan a headache. He drags the rest of the covers onto the floor and attempts to bury himself under it.

“You’re lying, you fuck,” he hisses, desperately trying to cling to the edges of sleep. “It’s Sunday. I never work on a Sunday. And I don’t know why you’re trying to torture me like this.”

Seokjin takes a good hold on the comforter and yanks hard at once, the threads tearing but wringing Jaehwan out of it like he’d flipped out of a hammock. Those last threads of sleep slip between his fingers, and now Jaehwan is almost angry to fight. 

“What the fuck did you do that for?!” he yells. His hands were red where they’d slapped the hardwood floors and he’s pretty sure his knees were going to be bruised.

Seokjin gives him the biggest, snarkiest smile. “You’ve got an interview today! Didn’t you check the updated schedule for the week I sent you?” he says sweetly. 

Truthfully, Jaehwan doesn’t care that maybe it did somehow stay in his schedule. “Just call them and tell them I’m sick and I’ll make it up some other time. You could go and answer the questions for me, right? Then they can just schedule a photoshoot at a later date.”

Seokjin starts to poke his side with his toes. “Sorry! There’s absolutely no rescheduling this interview from Elle.”

Jaehwan bolts up so fast that the world spins around him. “You’re kidding,” he says. 

Seokjin shakes his head. 

“Quit messing with me, Seokjin. This isn’t funny anymore.”

Again, Seokjin shakes his head. 

Jaehwan feels all the breath whoosh from his lungs at once. “Holy fucking shit, you got me an interview and photoshoot with one of the nation’s top magazines?!” He frantically pats around him for his phone, finding it safely still on the bed.

“I knew you’d be happy for a Sunday schedule like that,” Seokjin smirks. 

Jaehwan flicks through his phone to find this week’s schedule. He’d slept in until 10 AM and the interview was scheduled for 1 PM. 

“You asshole, the interview is in three hours and I look like trash! Why didn’t you wake me up sooner!”

Seokjin helpfully holds out a change of clothes. “I enjoy seeing you suffer once in a while.”

Jaehwan mocks the tone of his voice before taking the change of clothes and rushing into the bathroom. He doesn’t have any of his skincare things, but he figures the clothes Seokjin had pulled for him to make him seem not like a total wreck would have to be good enough until they got to the salon. His hair was a mess, but that could be fixed too. What really mattered was that Seokjin had picked out his favorite designer clothes that he hadn’t gotten to worn in some time: a Vetements hoodie where the sleeves slipped long past the tips of his fingers with a slim turtleneck tucked underneath, black slacks that hung tight around his thighs and cut off at his ankles, and Gucci embroidered sneakers. It was rare for him to have an occasion for the clothes, but it felt surreal to be wearing them and modeling for a fashion magazine. 

He can’t sit still during hair and makeup. The makeup artist at the salon keeps whacking his shoulder with an eyeshadow brush every time he gets too excited talking about the interview, but she does a stellar job with his makeup—soft, dark eyeshadow to create a small wing to his eye shape, subtle reds blending into warm browns into his crease, the smallest glint of highlight on his cheekbones, and flawless looking skin. The hair stylist threatens to tie him down to the chair if he moves, but she manages to tame his unruly bedhead into a clean look, his bangs pushed back but curled softly over his forehead and the rest of it a very tamed mess. 

It’s too perfect that this was happening, and he should have known better than to assume it would be as Seokjin said. Seokjin has never done anything just to be nice; he had to actually do his job as a secretary and actually “be a good friend” and all that bullshit. 

He walks into Elle headquarters and all heads turn towards him. For once, the attention feels good and he’s happy to bask in it. He smiles to people in the hallway and climbs into the elevator after the secretary that had showed them in. The elevator makes a slow climb to one of the top floors before dropping them off into a huge studio. A white background lined ceiling to floor half of the room, surrounded by a semicircle of lighting setups, cameras, monitors, tables and chairs filled with staff buzzing around. The manager steps up to him and greets him with a deep bow. 

“We’re so happy you accepted our invitation for this interview, CEO Lee,” he says, giving Jaehwan a firm handshake. 

Jaehwan blushes, wiggling his palm back beneath the sleeve of his sweater. “I’m honored to have been asked.”

The project manager leads him onto the floor, directing him towards behind one of the larger monitor setups where test shots of the set are being uploaded in real time to the monitors. He explains the setup of the photoshoot, what they’re expecting the mood of the photos to be, and afterwards there will be a videotaping of their interview that will go up on Elle’s official website as well as their official YouTube channel. Jaehwan pinches himself, not believing that this is real, and almost skips to the floor marking in front of all the cameras right before they begin taking his photos. 

“Right, let’s get these editorial photos knocked out for the piece on the Allied Tech merger marriage!” the director yells. “We’re starting with individual shots!”

Jaehwan doesn’t hear his name being called over the roaring in his ears. Seokjin looks so fucking smug where he’s standing off into a corner. This was a piece on his arranged marriage? And this was the only reason they’d asked for him to come?

Great.

He is going to kick Seokjin’s ass later. 

He’s stiff through the first half of his photoshoot, his smile tight and his body entirely uncooperative. It takes a lot of direction from the head photographer in order to get a batch of photos that look decent. It takes long enough that Jaehwan begins to sweat underneath the lights, but they finish soon enough and he’s corralled off to the side by some makeup artists to fix his makeup before the group shots.

Speaking of, the room suddenly falls silent as the door to the studio creaks open. And there stood Hongbin, and Jaehwan’s heart almost compacts so fast that it bursts. Hongbin looks stunning in his casual designer clothes, nothing gaudy or overtly fancy but lots of simple pieces that seemed to fit him perfectly. He wore much in the same color scheme as Jaehwan (and he had a sneaking suspicion that Seokjin and Gongchan had ganged up on them and organized their outfits): a white graphic top that flowed into grey denim and similar Gucci sneakers to Jaehwan’s. It was simple and classy, and his hair made him look all the more professional with his bangs pushed just slightly up to the edge of his forehead. His makeup was perfect too, subtle but still highlighted the curve of his eyes with dark, smoky red colors and sharpened the soft curves of his face. 

Everything came rushing back as soon as Hongbin’s gaze caught his: the yelling, the anger, the hot tears on his face as he stomped off. His chest ached for Hongbin, his heart pulling for that other polar magnetized end, his whole body pulling itself back into his gravitational orbit. 

Hongbin looks away, and the moment shatters. 

Jaehwan is directed towards a seat next to the director behind the monitors to watch. He tries to make his escape to Seokjin, make the excuse to have a quick moment with his secretary in which he would try his best not to murder his best friend, but Seokjin had mysteriously disappeared and the director was already pulling him down into the chair. He directs Hongbin to the center mark in front of the cameras, the staff pass over a few props, and then he goes over the feel of the photoshoot. 

Hongbin can only be described as a natural. He falls into the groove of the photoshoot easily, his demeanor clicking between professional and sultry in front of the camera to bubbly and sweet when speaking with the staff. He’s smiling in between shots, actively talking with the director to make his shots look better, and he never needs more than a moment of direction before nailing the look the photographers had asked for. 

It was stunning to watch. Jaehwan couldn’t catch his breath every time Hongbin looked into the camera with lustful eyes; he couldn’t look away from the photos that flashed up onto the monitor in front of him. 

He startles when the director pats his shoulder, calling him up for the group shots. His heart starts fluttering, frantic as every step closer is one towards Hongbin, who is still speaking animatedly with another photographer and some of the lighting staff. He says something funny and laughs at his own joke with the staff, and Jaehwan’s heart twists in his chest. 

As soon as he stands beside Hongbin, that awful tense aura seems to swirl back into life. Both of them shift uncomfortably, the thin sliver of space between them feeling like miles. Jaehwan had to bite down on his lip to stop himself from blurting out the apology he’d been ruminating on for the last week. 

“Now, I want you two to be natural in your style,” the director says. “The photographers will direct you, but I want your expressions to be as natural as possible—happy like all those sappy photos of newlyweds are.” He chuckles alone at his own comment. “We’ll be setting up a stool prop in the second half to get some different shots, but for now feel free to do as you want with the setup.”

Both of them nod stiffly as the director gives them a hard pat on the back and disappears behind his wall of monitors. The photographers prep their lighting and change their camera settings, and they both just stand stiffly in their spots like robots. 

It takes a little coercing from the photographers, but they manage to find a pose to start with. Their facial expressions are stiff, and they keep getting chastised for it. It takes them quite a bit of test shots before Jaehwan and Hongbin are at least comfortable enough to fake it. Realizing that he had forgotten his ring at home, Jaehwan tends to keep his hands in his pockets or behind Hongbin’s back and makes up for it with brighter smiles and filling in the gap between them. 

By the time the stool is put out to get varying height shots, both of them have found the groove that is something comfortable and natural to actually make it convincing. Hongbin poses on the stool and Jaehwan takes the position behind him. Every time Jaehwan is directed to put his arm on Hongbin’s shoulder his skin tingles from the electricity crackling through his veins. Sometimes Hongbin looks up at him as if to gauge his mood, but Jaehwan’s stomach drops because Hongbin’s gaze is nothing short of sultry and lustful—a look Jaehwan had never seen before so up close. In between shots when the director calls for a break, the tension returns a little bit and that chasm between them starts to feel like they’re looking into an endless pit. 

When it starts to feel like too much, like the ground is crumbling beneath Jaehwan’s feet and he’s going to slip into that chasm, Hongbin pokes him in the side to draw him back to the present. Hongbin doesn’t look at him as he does it, subtly moving his hands back to his lap to pretend as if it hadn’t happened. But it was enough. 

It meant that Hongbin had opened the door to help him step back through. 

When the photoshoot is done and they’ve looked through all the photos, they’re given a change of more professional suits and the set is changed to accommodate for the interview. They change in separate rooms, and even though Seokjin is nowhere to be found, his fake wedding band had been placed atop the new change of clothes. Jaehwan still sends him a very stern text in all caps about what the fuck he could have been thinking before slipping outside. His makeup gets taken off before he gets a more natural look, and then he’s directed back to Hongbin’s side in some stools set up before a camera.

Some of the staff behind the cameras whistle at them, and Jaehwan preens a little bit under the attention. Hongbin burns red to the tips of his ears and hides his face in his hands. 

The director pulls out a packet of questions and signals for the cameras to start rolling. “How did you two first meet?”

Both of them freeze up. Jaehwan’s fingers go cold and his heart stutters, but thankfully Hongbin recites back the official story. “We met back at business party two years ago,” he says. “We snuck out of the party onto the rooftop and stayed there until the night was over—well, until I accidentally spilled champagne from laughing too hard and Jaehwan offered to take me home.”

He sells the story well, gaze flitting nervously between Jaehwan and the camera. The story is not far off from the time they snuck out of wedding preparations onto the hotel balcony to escape, so it has some emotional truth to it. He looks flushed and shy every time their eyes meet, and Jaehwan feels his heart clench with guilt every time. 

“What was your first date like?”

Hongbin perks up this time, suddenly a lot more comfortable with the question. “Oh, it was nothing extravagant or anything. I cooked dinner for the both of us and Jaehwan brought home a fruit tart—the best one I’ve ever had—and we just talked for the whole night.”

Jaehwan’s jaw almost drops. That wasn’t the official story. 

The official story was that Jaehwan had taken Hongbin out to 3 Michelin Star restaurant where they spent the whole night talking and they kissed before parting ways. It was standard and typical and wouldn’t draw any attention to it being fake because it was almost believable to anyone else’s first date. But Hongbin had changed it to the first time they had ever really bonded, and Jaehwan’s insides were tying themselves up trying to put the puzzle pieces together. 

What the fuck was he trying to do?

He doesn’t add anything else to the question, but Hongbin looks at him with a knowing smile and his cheeks start to heat up. He actually smiles in return, because this feels like so many familiar nights they’d spent playing videogames on the couch. 

“You’ve been living together for almost a year now; what is something you can’t stand about each other?”

Again, Hongbin is the first one to pick up the question. “Oh, Jaehwan always spends two hours in the bathroom,” he says, actually smirking when he turns to meet Jaehwan. “And he also refuses to eat his vegetables, and he always eats the last slice of cake in the fridge.”

Jaehwan feels his face burning, but Hongbin throws his head back in a laugh at his disgruntled mumbling. His eyes sting too, because he’d missed the way Hongbin laughed. 

Hongbin was really trying. He was reaching a hand into his path and trying to pull him back into orbit. 

“Hongbin is way too neat!” he says, his tone much quieter but not hiding any of the happiness welling in his chest. “Also, I’m convinced he hides the television remotes around the house so that I’ll never find them.”

They’re still laughing even after the staff have stopped. 

“What’s something you both love doing together?”

“We play videogames!” they say simultaneously, catching each other’s smiles and chuckling. 

“Sometimes we’ll play the same game and switch off,” Hongbin says, glancing for a moment at his hands. 

Jaehwan interjects, “Or sometimes we’ll play against each other. We’ve been having a lot of fun with it.”

Jaehwan can see the director smiling from behind the cameras. “Alright, last question. What do you like most in each other?”

Jaehwan speaks up first, talking before his brain can catch him. “Hongbin is very dedicated. He puts all his heart into his work and he doesn’t give up even when things take a turn for the worst,” he says, feeling a lump rise into his throat. “Even if he’s shy, he’s very sarcastic and witty and he cares a lot for the people around him.”

He says it all, and then it’s suddenly so hard to breathe. “It helps that his face is pretty handsome too,” he adds, and it draws out a laugh from the staff which eases the tension off his chest for a little. 

But Hongbin hadn’t laughed. His cheeks were almost bright red from embarrassment. 

“I think Jaehwan is very genuine and sweet, and it’s difficult to find people like that,” Hongbin starts, nervously fiddling with the ends of his jacket. “He knows how to take care of people and he doesn’t hesitate to put others before himself. It feels like I’ve loved him for so long, but he always manages to surprise me.”

Jaehwan feels touched hearing it. He doesn’t know if Hongbin had meant to say that last part, but he comes to the very sudden realization that Hongbin had loved him for some time. Even if all of this had been fabricated from the beginning, he had found ways to fall in love with him, and Jaehwan had been carelessly holding Hongbin’s heart in his hand for some time.

He wouldn’t pass up the chance Hongbin had given him to be pulled back into orbit together. 

The director wraps up the interviewer and the both bow in thanks to all of the staff. Jaehwan finally sees Seokjin in the corner, smirking at him as he approaches. And as much as Jaehwan would love to throttle him and make sure he knew never to pull that fucking shit again, he instead places a heavy hand on Seokjin’s shoulder. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles, ducking his head and sliding away from the ‘I-know-I’m-right’ look on Seokjin’s face. 

He spies Hongbin about to leave, heading for the exit with Gongchan by his side, and he practically sprints over to catch his wrist. Hongbin looks up surprised, a little hurt flashing through his eyes. 

“I’ll see you at home,” Jaehwan says, breathless, holding Hongbin’s wrist tighter as the words tie themselves around his tongue. 

But Hongbin smiles and takes his hand. “I’ll see you at home,” he whispers.

Jaehwan watches him go, finally feeling like all of the stars were back in alignment. 

 

 

Jaehwan does go home after getting his things from Seokjin’s place. The first thing he does is apologize. 

“I’m sorry. I said things that I really shouldn’t have,” he says. He’d plopped down on the couch beside Hongbin, knees pulled up to his chest. “A lot of that was just… emotional baggage I’ve been carrying around for some time and I unfairly dumped it all on you like that.”

Hongbin doesn’t say anything. His gaze is steady as he listens. 

Jaehwan anxiously tugs a little too hard at the skin of his nails and winces. His stomach was flopping nervously and he just needed to explain himself. “My father had always prepared me for the limelight from a young age. He knew it would be good to have a young son in the news as the face of the company, and so he sent me to parties instead of my brothers so that the CEOs and business leaders would know me. It helped in some ways, because whenever I gave statements over my father, public opinion of the company was higher. That was just always how it worked since I finished high school and was given an official place in the company and I didn’t know any better.”

He sucks in a deep breath, his chest wringing tighter. “And then he had announced that I was going to be married and honestly, I didn’t know what to think. I sort of just believed that it was taking on another job for the company. But,” and he spares a glance at Hongbin, whose face doesn’t let on of anything he’s thinking, “You were different. You treated me like I was my own person and not an asset of the company you’d inherited. You always tried to reach out to me when there was nothing we had in common. You were the only one giving it an honest shot, like a normal relationship, and I’m sorry that I ruined that.”

He sniffles. His eyes hurt but he hadn’t started crying. That was good, at least. 

“I want to try again, if that’s okay? I don’t want to let it end like this because I care about you a lot.”

Hongbin stays quiet for a few moments. The tips of his ears are red. “We can try again,” he mumbles. He looks like he has something else to say, but ends up biting down on his words. He smiles and pulls Jaehwan into a hug instead. “We can definitely try again.”

Jaehwan sinks against Hongbin’s shoulder, feeling a wave of relief wash over him. He’d show Hongbin how he really felt someday. Now that he understood what he held, he wouldn’t be so brutal with Hongbin’s heart again. 

 

 

A week later finds them back on the couch, cuddled side by side beneath the same blanket, playing Persona 5 once more. 

Hongbin has the controller. He drags the party around the casino palace, in which he somehow has to raise 100,000 coins in order to access the next section. Both of them are fuming over the rigged slots and the fact that they can’t win any money and clearly are not grinding enough to beat any of the bosses. And then fucking Goro Akechi, dumbass ace detective of this fucking game, magically shows up with 100,000 coins on his own as if to show up everyone else. 

“Fuck him,” Hongbin mumbles, kicking out at the television. 

Jaehwan laughs, “I can’t believe you actually hate someone in this game.”

Hongbin gives him an incredulous look. “You mean to tell me you don’t hate that loser?”

“Well—“

“Oh my god, no, absolutely not. You can’t tell me that you actually like him.”

Jaehwan wiggles his toes beneath Hongbin’s couch cushion. He’s smiling so much his cheeks hurt; it’s just so much fun to tease Hongbin. “He isn’t that bad. He’s got a cool looking costume and he’s clearly the most powerful one in our party.”

“You did not just shame the protagonist like that!” Hongbin yells. 

“You’ve been sabotaging Akechi’s level ups and he’s still better than everyone else!”

Hongbin sinks back and grumbles, “Yeah, well, he’s a loser and I hate him.”

Jaehwan giggles and pokes Hongbin’s side. “Don’t worry, I hate him too,” he says.

Hongbin actually lets out a sigh of relief. “Thank god. I thought I was going to have to draw up a presentation to explain why Akechi is Bad and A Loser.”

Jaehwan hums thoughtfully. “No, I hate him too. There’s something that reminds me of CEO Shin, and I don’t quite know what it is.”

Hongbin falls silent at that. The sounds of the videogame fill up the space. “No, you’re right. We need to do something about that.”

“Should we become Phantom Thieves, then?” Jaehwan says, feeling a sudden burst of excitement. “I know he’s the one fucking with the company, so let’s take him down a notch!”

Excitement overcomes Hongbin and he practically lights up. His eyes go wide and sparkle and he sits up like the excitement couldn’t be contained. Jaehwan’s heart hammers against his ribs. 

“We’re going to need code names if we’re doing that,” Hongbin says. “I think ‘Ace’ would be a good code name for me.”

“No way, I’m calling you ‘Beanie’ in this operation,” Jaehwan teases. 

“Absolutely not! It needs to be something cool.”

Jaehwan hums for a moment. “How about ‘Neat Freak’?”

Hongbin gives him the biggest deadpan yet. 

“Okay, I can see it’s not popular with the crowd. How about ‘Dimples’?”

Hongbin’s cheeks turn pink, and he stutters, “Maybe not. How about just ‘Captain’?”

It’s apt, and simple enough. It’s maybe an oversimplification of the fire Jaehwan’s seen burn in his eyes, but it’s good enough. “Alright. I accept your choice. You will be known as Captain and I will go by—“

“Prince.”

Jaehwan stumbles over his words. “Why? I figured you would have said something dumb like ‘Cake Boy’.”

But Hongbin’s cheeks burn red and he takes a pillow from the couch and throws it at him. “No reason!”

Jaehwan ropes Hongbin into a headlock and ruffles his hair. “Nope, you said it! Prince it is! Prince and Captain out to steal your hearts!”

Hongbin manages to wiggle himself away and throws the controller in favor of curling up on himself. “I hate myself so much,” he mumbles into the couch. 

Jaehwan just smiles and pats Hongbin on the back. Cheers to being Phantom Thieves.

 

 

They talk it over, under much more professional terms, and decide to go through with threatening legal action against CEO Shin should he continue threatening Allied Tech with hackings. 

The hacking had been attempted once more in the time that it takes to collect evidence. This time, alarms go off when the server is invaded and the programmers on staff immediately begin tracking the source of the hacker. It doesn’t take them long to uncover that it hadn’t been done by a rival company, but by a private user who had received high security clearance information in some other manner. But they collect the evidence and the legal team prepares to pursue legal action against the individual. 

Finding the hacker had been tough, but doable. Finding the betrayers from the merger and the link to CEO Shin was harder. 

They try to target CEO Shin first, making pleasantries with him during shareholder meetings and trying to influence their fathers to question him about it, but he lets nothing on. 

Rather, CEO Shin becomes more vicious over time. When the legal packet reaches the hacker, it’s clear that CEO Shin becomes furious. He’s more outspoken during shareholder meetings, influences the other investors to side with him on important business decisions, and begins winning more contracts for his own, smaller companies, seemingly out of the blue. His gaze is hard and cold every time he’s in the room with the young CEOs, but Jaehwan and Hongbin are undeterred, knowing that they’d taken the first step to silencing him. 

But CEO Shin gives nothing away. He leaked nothing and, at least for now, getting any information on his link to the hacker would resort to illegal methods. 

Regardless, there were many other ways of cornering him and that was exactly how they planned to coerce the truth from him. 

Jaehwan knocks twice on Hongbin’s office door before he steps in. He plasters himself to the wall, dramatically looking both ways, before sliding himself along. “This is Prince reporting in. I got you the files, Captain,” he whispers as loudly as he can. 

Hongbin almost slams his head on the table. “Please let me forget my misery about that,” he groans. 

“Absolutely not,” Jaehwan responds, making a quick dive for the edge of the couch and squatting to hide. “I am absolutely never letting you live that down.”

Hongbin hides his face between his hands. “Spare me. Also, this isn’t a videogame and hiding behind that couch doesn’t mean that if someone walked through my door right now, you’d be invisible.”

Jaehwan huffs and stands up to his full height. “I was just trying to make it fun while it lasted.” He steps up to the desk and drops the huge file right in the center of the desk. “I’ve managed to get most of the information you asked for, especially the testimonials you wanted. I already sent of a copy to the legal team, but if you’d like to take a look at it too then please feel free.”

Hongbin flips through it a moment, humming as he speeds through a couple pages. He opens a drawer in his desk and passes Jaehwan a file about the same size. “Here’s your reading material for the night, then,” he says. “I managed to get access to some of his private finance records. Sure would be a shame if those made it out to the press.”

Both of them hi-five. Jaehwan almost retracts his hand sharply from the electricity stinging his palm. It was nearing sunset and Hongbin looked as if he were glowing in the soft twilight spilling into the room. His stomach flops as Hongbin smiles and says, “I’ll see you at home! Oh, and if you could pick up some stuff for the bathroom on your way home, I’d really appreciate it.”

Jaehwan gives him an exaggerated salute. Something about this was weirdly domestic for people being in a weird fake-married-but-not-dating stage. “Sure thing, Captain.”

Hongbin turns bright red at the name, but Jaehwan doesn’t turn around to see if Hongbin does actually slam his head onto the table. He can’t hear much behind the closed door with the sound of blood rushing through his ears

Seokjin teasingly asks him if he has a fever when he makes it back to his office. He smacks Seokjin with the documents as hard as he can before ducking into his office and hiding his face in his hands. 

 

 

After thorough council with the legal team, they begin putting pressure on CEO Shin. Through discreet, disguised notes passed to his secretaries, they anonymously let him know that they will be leaking his scandals to the press if he does not cooperate with Allied Tech. He doesn’t take the first or second threat seriously, but they knew that would happen. CEO Shin would not believe it with his own eyes if it were not there in front of him. 

So they leak a fourth of the press copy. It has no major scandals in it, but it hints at CEO Shin to be in the middle of a huge corruption scandal with undeclared off-shore accounts. 

To the average person, the reports could have seen fake or even just slanderous. However, CEO Shin saw the story released and lost nearly all his sanity at once. 

He stormed into the main conference hall, just as Hongbin and Jaehwan were closing the final deal for another local contract. CEO Shin is fuming, his face red and splotchy and spittle at the edge of his mouth like he’d just spent the last hour yelling at anyone in his face. 

“You think you’re going to get away with this,” he seethes. “Think again, kids.” And then he stomps off once more. 

For that, they leak another fourth of the press package. They promise the rest of the information as a press deal, knowing that if CEO Shin wasted to save the rest of his dignity, he would either fold to the legal repercussion of his actions or buy the story from the press so that it would not be released for an insane amount of money. 

Maybe he’s searching for dirt on them, but he nearly disappears after being cornered to buy the press package to prevent its release. For some time, he doesn’t come back to see them and Jaehwan has to count all his blessings for that one. At some point, he wasn’t sure that CEO Shin would even come back at one point. 

So that left them, for the time being, to deal with the internal investigation. 

Jaehwan decides to take care of it. For one, the less the employees knew of it the better off they’d be. They needed to narrow down a culprit fast—anyone in the high ranking engineering roles that could have betrayed them as a result of the merger. If word got out that they were conducting an investigation, then they would lose the final thread they needed to seek legal action against CEO Shin for what he’d done against Allied Tech. 

Jaehwan also wanted to take this responsibility on his own. He needed to prove his own worth to those who may have been hurt by his family’s business. If this was a way he could rectify not trying to speak up even more about the impending stock market crash, then this would be his chance. 

He starts by narrowing down the list of employees that had moved over from Lee Technologies. He manages to get the information from his brothers’ offices, sneaking in without them knowing to make copies of the files. From the list, he keeps the top two tiers of programmers, those who knew the deepest inner workings of the firewalls and fail safes as well as the list of those who had been fired from the company. 

From there, it’s a lot harder. His initially compiled list is about 300 people, and he spends an agonizing few days trying to narrow that down to even half that number. He takes out the people who had been hired as managers and senior developers after the merger had occurred, then anyone who hadn’t been with Lee Technologies for less than a year before the merger. It had to be someone who had spent a decent amount of time with the company if they were to hold that strong of a grudge against them. 

The next step is to begin cross-referencing from what data he can gather from CEO Shin’s smaller companies. He looks for overlaps between any names, family members working between companies, anyone who could have signed a non-disclosure agreement in the past that had terminated with time after changing companies. He even gathered data on CEO Shin’s secretaries and closest investors, hoping to find another lead there. 

It leaves him with about 50 potential suspect for the leak. Either people who had been fired during the merger that had held known grudges about Lee Technologies, anyone whose non-disclosure agreement had past the date of legal obligation and had moved to one of CEO Shin’s subsidiary companies, or current employees who were on the top tiers of security clearance that had come from the merger. 

It takes him weeks to contact everyone on the list because that’s the only way he can remain under everyone’s radar. Contacting anyone working in a new subsidiary company would be asking to draw CEO Shin’s attention, so he decides to leave that as a last resort if he doesn’t manage to find the leaker before then. He starts with anyone who had left the company at the time of the merger, calling each of them and conducting formal phone interviews in an attempt to assess whether they had been involved or not. 

Half the people don’t pick up. From the half that do, half of those people hang up on him angrily yelling that it was his fault they lost their jobs. And from the remaining five or so who are actually willing to talk to them, only one of them sounds mildly suspicious because instead of being angry like any other person had been, they had sounded eerily calm and scarily pleasant. 

Jaehwan decides to take the man’s name down for later. Jo Youngmin, a fresh college graduate who had unfortunately been sucked under during the merger. By what Jaehwan had found, he had simply gone back to his home town after losing his job.

He came home feeling like he’d just hit a wall, nothing had come up conclusive, but Hongbin takes his hands and puts a controller between them and makes him cheer up. He dedicates an entire day off to taking him out on not-a-date to the latest superhero movie and treating him to ice cream afterwards. 

(Jaehwan left with his hands sticky and his eyes unable to look away every time Hongbin laughed.)

And then that left the thirty or so in-person interview he conducted within the company. He grabbed programmers in groups of five to make it go as quickly as possible as well as being able to differentiate if anyone acted out of character among a group. Around the third interviewing group, he’d gotten a strange feeling from the group that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something was off between the way they were fidgeting, the way a few of them spoke. One of them was eerily calm and rarely spoke at all. 

Jaehwan hadn’t missed the way the man’s eyes flashed when he mentioned the job cut during the merger. He wrote off the group as suspicious even though he knew he’d lost his chance to conduct another meeting with them if word got around about what he was doing. 

He slams his head down on his desk and groans, surrounded in way too many files that were giving him a headache. He just wanted to find who was doing this—no, he desperately needed to and soon before CEO Shin decided he was going to make a bigger move against them. 

He pages Seokjin through his landline, the receiver being picked up within seconds. “I sure hope you’re doing actual work in there,” he says. 

Jaehwan rolls his eyes. “I am,” he sighs. “Actually, I need you to gather up images of employee ID photos from that list of people I sent you earlier. There’s something off from today’s interviews that I need to check out.”

“On it,” Seokjin says before hanging up. The line goes dead, buzzing for a moment before Jaehwan turns the phone off as well. He returns his head to his previous face down position on his desk, not looking up when the door opens some time later. 

“I see infiltrating the palace is going well,” Hongbin teases. 

Jaehwan whines, immediately popping his head up. “I would like to hereby disband the Phantom Thieves. I, your precious leader Prince, can no longer go forward with infiltrating the palace of CEO Shin. I shall soon succumb to the shadows,” he waxes on dramatically. “Take me to the Velvet Room, for I have failed the game!”

Hongbin laughs at him, perching on the edge of his desk. “Cheer up, leader,” he says. “I’m here to bring you good news.”

Jaehwan rests his chin on the palm of his hand, his heart jumping up to his throat. He didn’t know what it was about Hongbin today, maybe the way he’d styled his hair or the new suit, but he looked really good sitting on his desk. “Tell me, Captain, what is this good news you have brought me.”

Hongbin flushes at the nickname, but he’d given up trying to convince Jaehwan to stop using their dumb codenames. He slams a huge stack of paper onto the desk. “I brought you the compiled ID photo list.”

Jaehwan frowns. “What’s the good news?”

“The good news is that I brought it to you!” Hongbin smiles from ear to ear, smugly proud of himself. His happiness is infectious, and Jaehwan finds himself smiling too. 

“Good one,” he says, taking the file and immediately hopping through his own notebook where he’d jotted down anything suspicious. Hongbin takes a seat on the couch in his office and messes with his phone while Jaehwan peruses through the list. 

First, he searched through the photos just to see if he could pick out anything strange, but looking back through the photos of even 100 people was beginning to make his vision blur. The pictures were too small and pixelated to be able to pick up most features, and he decided to narrow it down more. He looked up anyone mildly suspicious from the interviews he had yet to conduct with the employees who had gone to subsidiary companies, but nothing had yielded from that. 

Then he looked through the photos of those who had been fired. It took him a moment to parse through the photos (bless Seokjin for having them organized by list he’d sent), but eventually he’d found the photo he was looking for. 

_Holy fuck_ he curses to himself, looking down at the photo of one Jo Youngmin. It was the same man who had been with that suspicious interview group in the board room. 

He quickly cross references it with the names from today’s group session. Jo Kwangmin had been the one calm man during the interview. Jaehwan comes down to two conclusions: either Kwangmin had a twin who had lost his job over a year ago and was carrying out a grudge on behalf of him or he had snuck back into the company under a fake identity. 

Either way, Jaehwan pins him as his target. Hongbin had been looking over curiously since he’d furiously flipped through pages, and Jaehwan is happy to meet his gaze with an excited smile. He was so happy he could kiss Hongbin.

Wait.

“So, what did you find, Sherlock?” Hongbin asks, perching himself back on the desk and closing in on Jaehwan’s space. 

Jaehwan pinches himself to get his brain back in motion. “I think I’ve found our Treasure,” he says, pointing down to the identical ID photos. He explains his thoughts, and Hongbin argues with him for good measure to make sure they have probable cause to question Kwangmin again, but he yields and gives Jaehwan a hefty pat on the shoulder. 

“You’ve done really well,” Hongbin sighs, smiling softly. “I’m really proud of you.”

Jaehwan blushes, immediately standing up some files to cover his face. He grumbles under his breath until Hongbin chuckles at him and waves him off, promising to see him at home.

It was time for them to send the calling card and get this settled once and for all. 

 

 

Questioning Kwangmin quickly went off the rails. 

Jaehwan had requested to do it alone, but that was starting to feel like a mistake. Kwangmin had known that he’d been caught as soon as the internal investigation had begun, and he’d hoped to submit his 2 weeks’ resignation so that he could slip out under the radar. But Jaehwan had cornered him into another questioning, disguising it as an interview promotion, and that had been the only way to influence Kwangmin back into his office. 

“So you think you’ve figured it out, huh?” Kwangmin sneers, leaning back into his chair. “You think you’ve got me pegged as the internal leaker.”

Jaehwan swallows thickly, but he doesn’t back down. “I just wanted to ask you a few questions, Mr. Jo, certainly nothing so formal. I do want to let you know that this conversation is being recorded for all intents and purposes, just so that the legal team can clear you of any wrongdoing if you are found to be innocent.”

Kwangmin scoffs at him, folding his arms and kicking his feet up on the table. “Good fucking luck pinning that on me.”

Jaehwan gives him a stiff smile, swallowing back the lump in his throat. He has to see this through. He pushes a photo across the table, and immediately Kwangmin’s face flashes with something unreadable. 

“This man looks remarkably like you. He was fired last year before the merger,” he says calmly, twisting his pen between his fingers. “Could you tell me your relationship to him?”

Kwangmin sinks back into his chair, shutting off completely. “He’s my twin brother. I sure hope that didn’t take you too long to figure out, Einstein.”

Jaehwan smiles, fuming beneath the surface. “I can see that well, Mr. Jo. Please tell me, how did you two end up working for Lee Technologies?”

Kwangmin gives nothing away, he doesn’t fidget in his seat nor does he stutter when he speaks. “Well, like most people who weren’t rich enough to be given money by their families, both of us worked side jobs through university to pay for it. We held an internship one summer with Lee Technologies and we were both hired out of graduation.”

He can’t deny that Kwangmin’s offhanded comments sting. But the need to prove himself beats out the emotions sloughing through his chest like tar. 

“I spoke with Youngmin the other day,” he says. “He seemed to be doing well for himself despite his firing.”

He knew his words would enrage Kwangmin; that’s what he was aiming for, but the fire that had engulfed him in turn almost burned him. 

“You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?!” Kwangmin yells, sitting up straight in his seat and looking at Jaehwan straight in the eyes. “How dare you invade employee privacy like that! I could fucking sue you for that.”

“I’m sorry to say that it is perfectly legal for me to contact past employees,” Jaehwan says, smiling. 

Kwangmin is having none of it though. “What do you fucking care about someone you just dropped off the face of the planet. You’re rich and powerful and you have the whole world under your little fingertip, what more could you possibly want?”

“I want to get to the bottom of the data breaches,” he says. “I don’t take attacks against my company lightly.”

“It’s not even yours,” Kwangmin mumbles beneath his breath. 

Again, Jaehwan only just manages to hold back the full body shiver threatening to tear him down. “Kwangmin, you will be protected if you give me any information on the leaks.”

Kwangmin gives him a hard, fiery look. “You’re just like the rest of them!” he shouts. 

“Youngmin was—“

“No, get my brother’s name out of your mouth. You don’t deserve it! He lost his whole life to that crash and he never received any compensation! You don’t know what you’ve done!”

That was the outburst he had been waiting for. He goes silent, the grip on his pen hard enough to turn his knuckles white. 

Kwangmin flops bonelessly back into his chair. “Fuck,” he bites out, punctuated by manic laughter. “This is so fucking shitty. Fine, you win. Give me protection and a compensation package and I’ll tell you.”

Jaehwan nods. “You have my word.”

Kwangmin nods, thinking to himself silently for a moment. The fire washes out of him and he’s much calmer as he starts to speak about what Youngmin had lost. Youngmin had put his own data into Lee Technologies and had been one of the few that had been subsequently hacked afterwards. His important data had been stolen—resident ID number, bank account information, home address, and passwords—and it had left him with essentially nothing to his name. The hacker had nearly erased his existence from the planet, but when Youngmin had tried to bring it up with the heads of corporate, they had fired him and moved on.

Jaehwan was fuming by the end of it. Kwangmin looked rather nonplussed. 

“I stepped up to the plate and worked for the both of us, got some promotions until he could get back on his feet again. And then,” and he stalls for a moment, looking around the room before he drops his voice,” CEO Shin approached me directly.

Jaehwan frowns. “He coerced you into cooperating.”

Kwangmin nods. “He threatened leaking my personal data if I didn’t help him. He offered me money I couldn’t say no to if I helped.”

Jaehwan gives him a small smile. That had been all the information he needed. “Thank you for telling me the truth. You will be granted protection from the law by Allied Tech and I will put together compensation for your brother within the next week. Please tell me a safe address that I can forward the information to so Youngmin can sign off on the information.”

Kwangmin, surprisingly looks taken aback. “For the son of Lee Technologies, I didn’t think you’d really help us out.”

But Jaehwan reaches over to pat Kwangmin’s knee comfortingly. “I am righting what wrongs I can. I am not going to follow the footsteps of corporate. I am my own person in this company too.”

Kwangmin smirks, but gives him a solemn nod as he leaves. “Alright, hotshot. Just know that if you don’t, then CEO Shin will really run you into the ground.”

“Frankly, I don’t plan on letting that happen.”

The door shuts, but Jaehwan doesn’t miss the fond tone of “stupid, rich assholes” being muffled from the other side. He gathers up his things and books it to the legal offices. 

 

 

A few days later, Jaehwan is leading a small meeting on the compensation packages, with Hongbin at his side, when CEO Shin storms into the conference room. His anger swirls around him like a vortex, threatening to suck them into a black hole. 

He’s breathing heavy, gritting his teeth, and he doesn’t say a word to break the silence as he stomps into the room with his hand raised. Jaehwan sees it coming, the collision blurring his sight as the fear seizes him up. Closer, closer, CEO Shin’s hand threatens to come down fast against his cheek. 

“You son of a—“ 

He freezes in midair. Jaehwan opens his eyes, his vision coming back splotchy. His heart stops seeing that Hongbin had stepped in front of him and had caught CEO Shin’s hand before it could come down on him. 

“Lay a hand on him, and I’ll personally ensure that you lose every asset you own,” Hongbin says, his voice scarily stoic and calm. 

CEO Shin doesn’t back down. “How dare you kids threaten me!” he yells, wrenching his arm from Hongbin’s grasp and attempting to close in on the both of them. “You think you’ve won, that you’re so damn smart. You’d better watch yourselves!”

Hongbin draws himself up to his full height. Jaehwan can see the subtle shake of his hands, but Hongbin refuses to back down. “I don’t think you’re in a position to speak, CEO Shin. May I remind you of the press package that could be released at any moment? The final links to so many of your open scandals would be exposed, and I don’t think you’d want that.”

CEO Shin is fuming, steam practically coming from his ears, but he takes a step back. “You brats wouldn’t dare stand against me.”

Jaehwan sucks in a deep breath and pushes Hongbin aside. He grabs a folder on the podium and passes the thick file on to CEO Shin. “This is the legal information we’ve processed on the hackings, already with full support from the current CEOs of Allied Tech,” he says, trying to keep his hands from shaking. “We have found concrete evidence for your actions against this company and we will be taking this to court. Any further talks should be discussed with our lawyers. We will also be seeking the protection of any witnesses, and any attack against them will be directly handled from the company.” 

He exhales, trying to catch his breath. He feels both sick to his stomach and ecstatic that they had finally pinned CEO Shin. Somewhere in his speech, Hongbin had taken his hand in his and was squeezing with all his might. 

CEO Shin’s mouth remains gaping wide open, floundering for words as his anger continues to build. The files wrinkle in his grip, but he steps back, his hand recoiling to his side. 

“This isn’t the last you’ve seen of me,” he seethes, eyes black with hatred as he meets their gazes. “You were sorely mistaken to mess with me.” He stomps off, cursing beneath his breath and slamming the door behind him. 

The conference room falls into an uneasy silence. Jaehwan lets out a huge exhale and sinks bonelessly to the floor, right in front of everyone in the room. 

Hongbin sinks to his knees beside him, his hands fretting in the air. “Are you okay?” he whispers, looking panicked everywhere he can reach. “Oh my god, please tell me you’re okay.”

And then, despite everything, Jaehwan is so overcome with happiness that he laughs (he could kiss Hongbin right now). “We did it!” he cheers, still trying to keep his voice to a whisper. 

Hongbin takes his shaking hands in his, squeezing tight around them. “Treasure retrieved,” he murmurs, smiling so wide that his face could split. His cheeks are flushed pink and he looks to still be teetering on the edge of adrenaline, but Jaehwan’s heart flutters around in his chest, threatening to break the confines of his ribs. 

He swallows back the butterflies. “Alright, pull me up, partner. We’ve got a presentation to finish.”

Hongbin laughs and tugs him up to his side, beaming at him like the brightest star in the sky. 

(Jaehwan thinks to himself, just for a moment, that he could get used to seeing that smile every day for eternity.)

 

 

On the one-year anniversary of their arranged marriage, they spend the evening cooking dinner together and playing videogames. It wouldn’t have felt right to do anything else. Hongbin had cooked an amazing pasta and Jaehwan had brought home fruit tart and they were both happily tucked beneath the same blanket on the couch. 

Now that he thinks about it, Jaehwan is in awe that they had made it this far together. He watches the way Hongbin’s brows knit together in focus, his tongue peeking between his pink lips as he thinks how to work through the final boss. He’s concentrating so hard that he hadn’t realized Jaehwan had been staring at him for so long.

Or maybe not. Hongbin’s cheeks were flushed. It was probably from more than just his excitement about almost finishing Persona 5.

One year later, almost 120 hours spent and they were so close to finishing the game. It came down to taking the hearts of the melancholic public in a fight against a god, and both of them were at the edge of their seats as the battle raged on. 

“This is so stressful,” Hongbin curses, his toes curling on the edge of the couch. “I’ve attacked all of its arms and it still won’t die.”

Jaehwan winces, another team member being afflicted with another status condition. He subconsciously pushes closer into Hongbin’s side. “Just keep going, I’m sure you’ve got this.”

Hongbin manages to start the battle of the boss’s final form, but not before it goes to a cutscene. Before they realize it, they’re holding hands as the protagonists get cut down one by one, knocked out by a continuous string of attacks. They’re holding their breaths and watching raptly as the protagonists keep struggling to get back up every time an attack cuts them down. It’s only by the strength of the masses that believed in them that brought out their true potential, that brought forward Joker’s final form to take one final swing at the boss. 

The room falls silent. Neither of them breathe for the span of time it takes for the end of game scenes to start playing. As soon as the characters show up on screen again, both of them let out a heavy exhale. 

“We did it,” Hongbin says, watching the screen incredulously. “Holy fuck, we did it.”

And without even thinking, Jaehwan grabs Hongbin’s shoulder and tackles him on the couch, laughing out of excitement and kissing him in his bliss.

It certainly wasn’t how he expected their first kiss to happen, even if he knew somehow that it would happen eventually. Hongbin’s jaw drops. He stares blankly at Jaehwan for a couple seconds before shoving his hands over his face and groaning. 

“Of course our first kiss would happen like a k-drama,” he whines, holding his head between his hands. He’d messed his hair up and his face was turning beet red. “I hate you so much.”

Jaehwan smiles and kisses Hongbin again. His heart could beat out of his chest any moment now. His hands tingle where he’s pinned Hongbin down, the electricity sharp in his veins and prickling up his spine. His head spins as he laughs and pulls them both upright again. 

“Might as well start from the beginning,” he says, stuttering when he sees the way Hongbin’s eyes are sparkling. “Do you wanna go out on a date some time? I know this great 3 Michelin Star restaurant.”

Hongbin laughs and bats his shoulder. “Shut up,” he says, shyly ducking his head away. “If you really want to impress me, you should take me on a date in the park.”

Jaehwan smiles and curls himself into Hongbin’s side. “Deal,” he whispers drawing up the covers around himself once more. Hongbin ruffles his hair and sinks back into the warmth between them.

Jaehwan easily falls into the lull of the gravitational force holding their planets together. He lets go, eagerly awaiting the ways his life would surely change.


End file.
